CEMH Digital Talk: Peter Wood (Professor Emeritus, Duke University)

Title: “Which Rivers Go Where?: Initial French Efforts to Understand and Map the American West, 1670-1720.”

Abstract: French explorers probing westward beyond the Great Lakes in the late 1600s, seeking a route to the Pacific, were motivated by imperial competition and geographic curiosity, as well as a desire for hidden wealth, potential religious converts and rapid personal fame. Using their uncertain maps and limited accounts, this talk sketches the expeditions of three remarkable but often-dismissed French-born adventurers: Robert La Salle, Baron Lahontan, and Jean Couture. Aided by Native American informants, they labored to understand the West through the vast rivers we know as the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Rio Grande.

Bio: Peter H. Wood is an emeritus professor of early American history from Duke University, best known for his pioneering work on African enslavement in colonial South Carolina. Ever since publishing an article on La Salle in the American Historical Review (April 1984), he has been interested in the extensive and muddled history of early French exploration in the America West.

Part of the Panic and Plague in 1720 and 2020 Lecture Series