Texas History Tour - French influence - La Petit Belle and Fort St. Louis

La Salle was a very cocky French explorer. He convinced the French monarchy to begin building forts along the Mississippi River. Rather than follow the established routes, including Canada and down, La Salle decided to try and sail straight to the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunate for La Salle, he missed the mouth of the Mississippi and ended up in Matagorda Bay in 1685. While there, his ship La Belle, ran aground and quickly sank.

The people with La Salle, took everything they could and moved inland and established what we call Fort St. Louis, along Garcitas Creek, near present day Victoria. The Indians weren't happy with the settlers when they felt like the settlers cheated them in trade. The Karankawa's were apparently the kind of people who are great as friends but don't make enemies of them. While La Salle went to look for other French settlers, the Indians apparently were upset with the settlers and killed everyone at the Fort. A year later, the Spanish found the fort and buried everything. La Salle, while exploring in East TX, near Navasota, was killed by his men.

In the 1990's, the state of Texas found and excavated the La Belle. There are numerous museums along the coast that have parts of the exhibit on display. The main exhibit is in Austin at the Bullock Museum. Due to time constraints, we only selected one museum to visit - the one in Palacias because they have a 1/2 size replica of La Belle.

We also discovered that the cannons from Fort St. Louis were uncovered and most of them are on display in Victoria at the Museum of the Coastal Bend. So, we added a small stop to see the museum in Victoria (and the avoid the mosquitoes)

It's amazing to me that the size of La Belle (not the 1/2 replica) is not much bigger than my RV. The RV gets cramped with 9 people, I can't imagine what 80 people would be like.

The museum has a wonderful collection of items excavated from La Belle. There are many trinkets that were to be used as gifts for Indians and lots of daily living items.

The river picture is where the fort was located. The museum also has a great kids exhibit where they could build a ship and pretend to steer a boat or practice knot tying.

One of the most interesting artifact was the hot cocoa warmer. There were several among the exhibit. We also saw some warmers at the museum in Goliad. Must be an great treat!

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