René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (1643-1687) was a French explorer in the Great Lakes region who traveled the Mississippi River, claiming the territory for France. Born and raised in France and educated in the Jesuit religious order, he went to Montreal in New France in 1666. On one of his expeditions in the subsequent years he built the first sailing ship on the Great Lakes, Le Griffon. Part of his legacy was a chain of forts from Ontario into present-day Ohio and Illinois that extended French control and the French fur trade into the region of the present Great Lakes states.

Author Francis Parkman was one of America’s best-known and most respected historians in the late nineteenth century. He drew on a great depth of expertise about the history of the French in North America for this book, which was long considered a standard history on the topic.