Here’s a little historickal note that tickled my fancy as I was sitting about in the waiting area down at the hospital yesterday: While I always knew that Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle had explored the Texas coast around 1684, I never realized that he had, in fact, fetched up in Matagorda Bay and built a fort near the Lavaca River.

Why is this interesting to me? Because that’s where we used to go fishing when I was a kid.  Granted, we were based at Port O’Connor, which is about fifteen miles down the bay from where La Salle built Fort St. Louis, but still, we spent a lot of time in Pass Cavallo – the entrance to the bay and the site of the wreck of one of La Salle’s ships.

It’s probably just as well that I didn’t realize this nugget of history at the time, because I probably would have been an even more insufferable dork than I was already.

BTW, in case you were interested, after all kinds of problems including the loss of all his ships and most of his supplies, La Salle decided to strike out from Fort St. Louis for the Mississippi on foot, with the plan of eventually getting back up to the Great Lakes and on to New France for help.  He left some 40-odd colonists there.  When a Spanish strike force showed up a few months later to wipe the place out, they found that someone – probably Indians – had beat them to it.  In the meanwhile, La Salle was murdered by some of his own men near the Trinity River in East Texas.