Did rene robert de lasalle find the mississippi and the ohio river?
LaSalle was the first to explore the Mississippi as far south as its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico. This was in 1682. On April 9th of that year, LaSalle held a ceremony on the shore of the Mississippi near the Gulf of Mexico claiming all the lands drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries for Louis XIV, King of France and called it Louisiana in his honor. This included all the land west of the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains. The importance of this is that, 120 years later, Napoleon, then the Emperor of France, sold Louisiana to the USA for $23.2 million in 1803 – the Louisiana Purchase. 828,000 square miles of land, later to become the Great Plains states, were thereby added to the USA. These states include North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Minnesota, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and the western part of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee as well as eastern Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. But not Texas, New Me
