NOVEMBER 21:

Rouen, France in 1643; murdered by his men Mar. 19, 1687 in Texas. La Salle entered the Jesuit order as a novitiate in 1658, but was released from his vows in 1667 due to mental instability; sailed for New France; joined Sulpician expedition, falsely claiming to speak Iroquois; 1673 persuaded Frontenac to grant him letters of nobility; 1678 got commission to explore the west, and started chain of trading posts; 1682 descended the Mississippi to its delta with a party of French and Indian guides, and on April 09, claimed the entire region for Louis XIV; 1864 given command of an expedition to invade Mexico via the Rio Grande; Feb. 1685 landed at Matagorda Bay in Texas after losing most of his supply ships; Apr 1686 set off for Fort St-Louis-des-Illinois with 20 men to seek help, but killed en route.

November 21, 1805:  Lewis and Clark meet Chiltz Indians.

November 21, 1836:  Battle of Wahoo Swamp:  On this day a battle is fought on the Withlacoochee river in the Wahoo Swamp. American forces, with Indian allies, are led by General Richard Call. The Seminoles are led by Chiefs Osuchee and Yaholooche. After chasing the Seminoles across the river, the American forces call an end to their advance when they believe the river is too deep to cross in force. Creek indian, David Moniac, is killed in the battle of Wahoo Swamp, in central Florida, by Seminoles. Moniac graduated from West Point. Moniac will be part of a force of almost 700 Creek warriors, and white soldiers.
 
 
 

BACKGROUND:
 

From http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/thrush/thrush.html
 

The People of Huchoosedah

The Native Americans of Puget Sound have been known as Puget Salish and Southern Coast Salish, and by various spellings of tribes and reservations such as Duwamish, Nisqually, Skagit, and Snoqualmie.  ...  they are called the Lushootseed peoples. Lushootseed comes from two words, one meaning "salt water" and the other meaning "language," and refers to the common language, made up of many local dialects, that was spoken throughout the region. Lushootseed territories covered a large part of what is now western Washington, from near present-day Bellingham south to the state capital of Olympia, and from the Cascade Mountains west to Hood Canal.  Their northern neighbors were the Lummi and Nooksack peoples, while the Twana, Chimacum, and S'Klallam lived to the west.  The Chehalis lived to the south, and the Cascades formed a boundary, crossed by high mountain trails, with the Yakama and other peoples of the Columbia Plateau.
 

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For Chehalis tribal profile, please see http://www.npaihb.org/profiles/chehalis.html
 
 

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>From http://www.wa.gov/esd/lmea/pubs/profiles/lewiech.htm
 

The following history is excerpted from The History of Lewis County Washington, edited by Alma and John Nix; Washington: A Centennial History, by Robert E. Ficken and Charles P. LeWarne; and Centralia, The First Fifty Years, Herndon Smith, compiler.

The first economic activity in what is now Lewis County was trade. The Cowlitz and Chehalis Indians had developed an extensive trading system between the many sub-tribes that they consisted of, and with other peoples from quite a distance away. Both tribes were river-dependent; that is, they relied upon the rivers for the mainstay of their diet: salmon. Consequently, they developed into expert canoemen and fishermen.

Salmon, and particularly dried salmon, was their main food and their primary export. The Upper Cowlitz people, who had horses and so were more mobile and less dependent upon the rivers, would even trade with the Yakamas for roots, herbs, and berries. The Chehalis Tribe remained with the rivers to a greater degree and developed a trading route that went from the Cowlitz River system to the Chehalis River system. This canoe route with its relatively easy portages was used well into the 19th century (by whites as well as Native Americans) when the first road was built from Fort Vancouver to Fort Nisqually by the U.S. military.

Although the Native American population in Lewis County is hard to determine, one report indicates that a gathering of the Upper Chehalis Tribe at Ford's Prairie in 1855 was 5,000 strong. Twenty years later, Sydney Ford, an early settler and Indian Agent whose district included Lewis County, lamented that the Indian population in western Washington south of Puget Sound had decreased to only 1,200 people. Small pox, measles, the flu, venereal disease, and alcohol-related health problems had decimated the once thriving river communities. The bulk of the Indian people had been moved to the Chehalis Reservation in adjacent Grays Harbor County in 1864.