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The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684-1687 (review)
- Libraries & Culture
- University of Texas Press
- Volume 37, Number 3, Summer 2002
- pp. 283-284
- 10.1353/lac.2002.0053
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Libraries & Culture 37.3 (2002) 283-284
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Book Review
The La Salle Expedition to Texas:
The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684-1687
The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684-1687. Edited by William C. Foster. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1998. x, 350 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-87611-165-7.
Henri Joutel was La Salle's faithful lieutenant during the Texas expedition of 1685-87 that ended in the death of all but a small handfull of French colonists. Joutel survived and returned to France, never to go back to America. From 24 July 1684, when he departed from La Rochelle, until 2 August 1687, when he finally reached the Mississippi, Joutel kept a journal that was published in an abbreviated version in 1713 (Journal historique du dernier voyage . . . rédigé & mis en ordre par Monsieur de Michel [Paris: Chez E. Robinot, 1713]). An English translation appeared the following year, and a reprint of this translation was published in 1962 (A Journal of La Salle's Last Voyage, introduction by Darrett B. Rutman [New York: Corinth Books]). A more complete and scholarly edition of the journal was published by Pierre Margry in the third volume of his Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l'ouest et dans le sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale 1614-1754 (6 vols. [Paris: D. Jouaust, 1876-86]).
Although Margry's own editorial work on the journal should be reexamined, it is this version that Johanna S. Warren has translated into English and that William C. Foster has edited. Joutel's French is full of seventeenth-century linguistic turns and forgotten maritime expressions, and even though this translation "is fashioned to be easily readable" (6), it is a good and accurate translation. But it is an incomplete translation, a fact that comes as a bit of a shock, since Foster claims it to be "the first published and fully annotated English translation of Pierre Margry's version of the journal" (4). In reality, this new translation stops after chapter 16 (without any explanation or even mention of the fact!), while Margry's version contains twenty-three chapters. Seventy pages are therefore missing, and they are, as Robert Weddle has shown, of the highest importance regarding the entire expedition.
In his introduction Foster describes the geography of Texas and dwells in particular on its rivers (whose French or Spanish names are open to interpretation) and on its climate, which was different from what it has become today. He recounts the history of early Spanish exploration and occupation of Texas and examines all the accounts known today of La Salle's expedition. The Interrogation of Pierre Meunier by the Spanish is translated in an appendix. Foster revisits some of the historiography on La Salle, from Francis Parkman's La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897) to Robert Weddle's French Thorn (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), and sides with Herbert Bolton and William Dunn regarding the routes La Salle traveled in Texas and where he died. "La Salle was killed near the junction of the Brazos (or the French Canoe) and the Navasota rivers" (37). It must be noted that there is no consensus today regarding where La Salle died. Foster also raises the possibility that the French colonist, who never married, might have been homosexual.
More interestingly, he sees in Joutel an explorer, an ethnologist, and a naturalist. He shows that Joutel identifies "more than eighty Indian tribes and describes more than eighty species of wild animals and native and domesticated plants" (5). In another appendix, Foster lists 116 Indian tribes, or bands, named by Joutel. His journal is a source of knowledge "for ethnographers, geographers, biologists, botanists, demographers, and archaeologists" (33).
The journal does not speak about a particular collection of books that were found on the site of the fort by the Spaniards in 1689. Francis Parkman stated [End Page 283] that when the Spaniards discovered the remains of the French settlement, they...