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Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, first heard of the river on which he was to spend most of his life, from the Captain of the ship that was taking him to the New World. "It is called the Mississippi—Father of Waters—so big that it seems the parent of all other streams." From that moment La Salle knew that every thing he did in the months and years to follow would be another step on the journey to the hidden mysterious source of the great river, whose discovery became the dream by which he lived.
It was a long, hard journey. First he established a settlement in Canada, but the palisade around his clearing, like all fences, made him feel hemmed in, and finally he was able to arrange his first trip into the unknown lands where the Mississippi flowed. He carried with him a few tangible things—the scarlet cape he always wore whenever he joined the Indians in festivals, and the bronze plaque that the King of France had given him to set into the earth at the mouth of the great river. But he carried too a number of intangible things, even more important: his own great courage, his unfailing ambition, and the wonderful ability he had to meet the Indians as friends.
Robert Cavelier de La Salle was destined to achieve only part of his dream of charting the course of the great Mississippi, for the hostility and envy of men in his own band worked against him, and he was forced to leave to the younger men who would follow him, the task of settling the lands. It was enough that he had dared to follow the river from its hidden source to the warm lands of the Gulf of Mexico where finally it met the sea. La Salle endured both defeats and success before he died, never realizing that his vision of the establishment of the French Empire in the New World was now a foregone conclusion. This story of the way he followed his dream is the thrilling story of how one man achieved greatness.
—from the book
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