FORT ST. LOUIS. René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle,qv established Fort St. Louis of Texas in the summer of 1685 on the Texas coast. The site has long been in controversy. Period maps and documents support Herbert E. Bolton'sqv conclusion that it was on the right bank of Garcitas Creek "a league and a half" from its mouth in Lavaca Bay, in what is now Victoria County. Yet archeologists have been unable to substantiate that location, and evidence continues to be offered in favor of the Lavaca River in Jackson County, rather than Garcitas Creek.
The previous February La Salle, seeking the mouth of the Mississippi River, had landed his 280 colonists, including 100 soldiers, at the mouth of Matagorda Bay in Spanish-claimed territory. A temporary camp was made on Matagorda Island while he sought a more secure location farther up the bay. Staking the site on an eminence overlooking the "Rivière aux Boeufs"-so named for the numerous buffaloqv on the surrounding prairie-in April, he put men to felling timber.
Early in June La Salle sent word for the colonists to proceed overland to the new site. The bark Belle plied between the temporary camp and a supply dump at Indian Point (now in Calhoun County), bringing supplies and timbers from the storeship Aimable,qv which had been wrecked in Cavallo Pass, between Matagorda Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The cargo was transshipped to canoes for the rest of the journey.
During the building of the fort disease and overwork took a heavy toll. By the end of July the colony had been reduced by more than half. La Salle saw the building well under way, then set out in autumn 1685 to explore the surrounding country. When he departed in January 1687 on his last journey, he left at the fort scarcely more than twenty men, women, and children in the charge of the Sieur de Barbier.qv
With La Salle himself dead from an assassin's bullet, the end came for Fort St. Louis in late 1688 or early 1689, when the Karankawa Indians gained entry under guise of friendship and murdered all the occupants but five children. These were kept by the tribe until rescued later by the Spanish expeditions of Alonso De León and Domingo Terán de los Ríos.qqv One of the children, Jean-Baptiste Talon, nine years old at the time, gave the only eyewitness account.
The best description of the fort comes from the De León expedition, which found the ruins on April 22, 1689. Of six buildings, the one nearest the creek served as the fort. Solidly built of ship timbers, it had a gabled roof covered with planking and stood four varas high, with an attic storeroom above the four rooms at ground level. The other houses, "not very large," were built of poles plastered with mud and roofed with buffalo hides. A picket fence enclosed a corn patch and an herb garden.
In 1721 the Marqués de Aguayoqv claimed to have built Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía Presidio on the same site, where he turned up various French artifacts while digging the foundation. The presidio was situated on the Garcitas Creek site favored by Bolton. Yet archeologists have failed to find conclusive evidence that Fort St. Louis was at the same place. The question may never be settled to everyone's satisfaction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed., Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 (New York: Scribner, 1908; rpt., New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959). Pierre Margry, ed., Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l'ouest et dans le sud de l'Amérique septentrionale, 1614-1754 (6 vols., Paris: Jouast, 1876-86). Walter J. O'Donnell, trans., La Salle's Occupation of Texas (Preliminary Studies of the Texas Catholic Historical Society 3.2 [April 1936]). Robert S. Weddle, Wilderness Manhunt: The Spanish Search for La Salle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973).
Robert S. Weddle
