Far South Lancaster’s biggest claim to fame is that, nearly two centuries before it was even incorporated as a city, famed French explorer Robert Cavelier, sieur de la Salle, was killed hereabouts by men of a portion of his expedition that he was taking back to the Illinois country to get help, from French outposts there.
Instead, Robert Weddle, in “The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle” (La Belle being one of the ships of La Salle’s misguided expedition to settle the”Mississippi,” which wrecked in Matagorda Bay), says previous La Salle interpreters have gotten their entire Texas river system off by one river, miscalculating admittedly difficult measurements extracted from diaries of some of the men in the group that accompanied La Salle to the northeast to go for help.
Weddle argues, rather persuasively, that La Salle was instead murdered in 1685 just east of the Trinity and not the Brazos. So, there probably should be a statue of La Salle about 20 miles east of Huntsville or Madisonville, and not in downtown Far South Lancaster.
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