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  n Search of La Salle, a co-production of Windward Media and HoustonPBS, is a compelling exploration of the life and times of one of America's most interesting prototypes: the European discoverer, deprived of fame in the Old World, risking all to find it in the New.
The documentary begins with bourgeois Rene Robert Caveller's youth in Catholic France, where a Jesuit-dominated hierarchy, nestled in the court of Louis XIV, tried to squelch all but missionary exploration. In this world the discoverer was a Jesuit apprentice-turned renegade, accused by the order of everything from impertinence to lunacy for his ambitions.
 Next comes the emergence of Cavaller, now the self-proclaimed Sieur de La Salle, in free-wheeling, mercantile Quebec and Montreal. His pluck and verve made him a fortune, earned him a host of enemies and won him royal sanction of the title he had usurped -- along with permission to explore North America's vast interior and southern coast.
 Finally, the documentary uncovers the drama of La Salle's expedition to colonize the Gulf of Mexico ultimately fatal in all it's short-lived successes and mounting failures. In Search of La Salle offers a rich portrayal of the conflicting lives of the French company, who ultimately turn murderous, the powerful Spanish guarding the coast, and the Native Americans who fill the virgin territory from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.
 The documentary also focuses on the excavation of the Belle, La Salle's ship on his ill-starred quest. Painstakingly raised in 1996 from the shallow waters of Matagorda Bay, its artifacts speak compellingly about the lives of the Gulf's first, though brief, European settlers.
Always, the enigmatic La Salle is at the core of the documentary. In his life, he scored the personal success of opening up the vast interior of North America. After his death, brought on by his own faulty cartography, rumors of his expedition stirred the Spanish to send party after party to search for him, along the way opening up the Gulf Coast.
 To some, La Salle will seem an arrogant exploiter, reared in the smugness of Europe and unleashed on an innocent America; others will see him in a kinder light, an ambitious and imperious man, yet one who would risk his life for a friend, learn the customs and languages of numerous native tribes and, ultimately, impose no sacrifice on his men that he himself would not pay.
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