La Salle

The Sieur de La Salle's story begins in 1682, when he sets out with twenty-two Frenchmen, eighteen Indians, and his always-grumbling, epileptic cartographer, Pierre Goupil, to chart the length of the Mississippi River. In the course of this breathtaking novel, we see early America as seldom before. This is a world as foreign to us as any, for, as John Vernon points out, “the map of North America, so etched in our imaginations, with the great furrow of the Mississippi River running down the ...