Somewhere, while flying to Argentina or the United Arab Emirates, Vic Gurule of Hurst, Texas, read a newspaper story about a Texas archeological expedition that uncovered the remains of a French explorer’s 17th Century sailing ship.
The story captivated Gurule. It reminded him of his childhood, a time when he thought of himself as Spanish, a time before he knew he descended from a French colonist aboard the ill-fated mission of Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.
Gurule read the newspaper story closely. After all, this was not just any ancestor, but one who had deserted the tragic expedition and then gone on to unintentionally further destroy La Salle’s plans.
A simple plan
La Salle landed on the Texas coast in 1685, hoping to establish large French families to thwart Spanish expansion.
Gurule’s ancestor not only abandoned the expedition but went on to marry a Spanish woman, and by doing so, established what became many generations of primarily Spanish-blood families.
Gurule, now 60 and retired, read about the discovery of La Salle’s ship La Belle in the late-1990s, when he was an executive with Lockheed Martin Corp.
The news story Gurule read went something like this:
“PORT O’CONNOR — Texas archeologists today completed a $4 million excavation that yielded more than 1 million artifacts from Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s, sailing ship that sunk during a storm in Matagorda Bay more than 300 years ago.
“Texas A&M University archeologist Barto Arnold and a team discovered the wreck in 1995. Arnold, armed with an old Spanish map that marked the site of the sunken ship, had spent 17 years searching off and on for La Salle’s ship La Belle.
“The 17th Century explorer’s ship, which sank in 1686, was located in 12 feet of silty, low-visibility water. Archeologists built a watertight dam, called a cofferdam, around the wreck. Gulf water was pumped out. Beginning in September 1996, Texas Historical Commission archeologists were able to excavate on nearly dry land. The 51-foot La Belle lay under about 2 feet of silt.
“Among the finds were bronze cannons, bronze bells, musket balls, wooden boxes with tools and trade goods, an inexplicable Roman coin dating to A.D. 69 and the skeleton of an expedition member found in the hold atop a thick coil of anchor rope.”
Gurule’s ancestor likely had walked those decks, watched La Belle’s sails unfurl and gazed at the Texas shore, wondering what legacy he would leave in this new world.
Gurule felt he didn’t fit in, back when he was a boy in Santa Fe.
At school, many of Gurule’s classmates descended from families who traced their roots to Spanish Colonial times. His friends proudly carried their surnames as if they were the flags of the conquistadors.
Gurule looked just like his friends. But his family considered itself Spanish, not Hispanic — a link to colonial days.
Still, there was that last name. It wasn’t a common Spanish name. In fact, it was rare outside of Santa Fe. It sounded so French.
“I felt it set me apart,” Gurule says now of those years in the late 1940s when he was growing up. “I didn’t fit in with the white kids in my neighborhood, and I didn’t fit in with the Spanish kids at school.”
It wasn’t until 1985 that the family’s question about its last name was answered.
That year, historian and writer Virginia L. Olmsted published research in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly that astounded American families with the last name of Gurule.
Olmsted found the first official appearance of the surname in church records held by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe. Spanish marriage law in early New Mexico required testimony by witnesses to certify that both parties were free to marry. These diligencias matrimoniales, or prenuptial investigations, revealed this:
Name change
In 1699, a tattooed man named Santiago Gurule married Elena Gallegos. His witnesses were Pierre Meusnier and Jean L’Archeveque, who stated they had known Gurule for 15 years and that all had been soldiers together on the La Salle expedition.
Santiago Gurule was not the man’s real name.
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He had started out in life as Jacques Grolet, baptized in La Rochelle, France. The year is uncertain.
He traveled with La Salle to the New World before breaking free from what has been described as La Salle’s cruel mistreatment of his colonists.
Five years later, the Spanish found him in the wilds of East Texas. He was naked except for a few pelts and tattoos, and he and his companion, Jean L’Archeveque, had been living with Indians. L’Archeveque is described by a diarist for the expedition, Henri Joutel, as a servant whom he referred to as “Creature.” L’Archeveque was among those who ambushed La Salle and murdered him, leaving his body unburied in the woods.
Spanish soldiers took the two men to Mexico and then Spain, where they told Spanish authorities about the La Salle expedition and of his mistreatment of his people.
The two pleaded to be sent back to the New World as escorts for Spanish expeditions. Their names show up on the expedition list for the Diego de Vargas expedition into New Mexico in 1692, only changed to Santiago Gurule and Juan Archibeque.
It was customary in Spain to alter foreign names, a Gurule family story goes. And it is also likely that the men had reason to hide their identities on this mission where they were working for the enemies of France.
Their identities didn’t stay hidden forever. Two centuries later, famed archeologist Aldolph Bandelier heard stories about los frances families in New Mexico and wondered who they were.
After arriving in New Mexico, the men’s names were recorded under various spellings, sometimes reverting to French. Yet the surnames Gurule and Archibeque were passed on to generations of children.
“Gurule is a made-up name,” says Angela Lewis, a descendent of Grolet/Gurule and founder of the www.gurulefamily.org genealogy Web site.
“Gurule” is shared only by direct descendants of the La Salle expedition or by their Indian slaves who had assumed the Gurule surname, or those who married into the family, Lewis says.
“He had red hair. I know it, I know it, I know it,” Lewis says, pointing to the occasional redhead in the family as evidence that Grolet/Gurule was a redhead.
For modern-day Gurules, learning the connection to their French ancestor is an emotional experience. “It feels great,” says Jimmy Gurule, a law professor at Notre Dame who also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy.
“I only learned of the connection a few years ago,” Jimmy Gurule says.
“I’ve done enough reading about it that I am convinced it is accurate.”
For Vic Gurule, now retired, the origin of his last name has given him a sense of understanding but has not shaken what he calls his long-standing Spanish identity.
“I knew the name sounds French, but I never felt that way,” Gurule says.
He admires his ancestor Grolet/Gurule.
“This man had gone from France, to Texas, to Spain, to Mexico and then New Mexico. He was incredible for his time.”
Explorations ended in horror
FT. WORTH — Explorer Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, often is described in encyclopedia entries as a “celebrated” explorer, if his character is mentioned at all.
Historians in recent years have been more willing to openly discuss the dark side of the famed Frenchman.
“Today we would probably describe him as mentally ill, possibly paranoid-schizophrenic,” says Jim Bruseth, director of the Texas Historical Commission’s archeological division and a lead archeologist on the 1996-2002 excavations of the ship La Belle and La Salle’s small French colony, Ft. St. Louis.
“In textbooks he was a hero, but he was a real person with real problems,” Bruseth says.
Bruseth is writing a book, “From a Watery Grave: The Discovery and Excavation of La Salle’s Shipwreck the Belle,” which is to be published by Texas A&M University Press in 2004.
A knight of the extravagant French court of Louis XIV, La Salle made his name in 1682, when he explored the length of the Mississippi River, claiming its vast drainage area for France and naming it the Louisiana Territory.
In 1684, he set out again from France, this time to found a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi. Spanish pirates captured one of La Salle’s ships, the St. Francois, in the Caribbean.
The remaining three ships overshot the mouth of the Mississippi by about 400 miles, landing instead in Matagorda Bay on the Texas coast in 1685.
Upon landing, soldiers, sailors, priests, carpenters, women and children disembarked to build what would become known as Ft. St. Louis, near present-day Victoria. Historians estimate the French settlers’ numbers at 150 to 300.
Thrown together
Ft. St. Louis was not truly a fort, writes Texas historian Robert S. Weddle, but a hastily constructed building of timbers, and huts of sticks and mud.
It must have been a particularly grim place only a month after arriving, when La Salle lost his second ship, L’Aimable. The cargo ship sank in a storm in Matagorda Bay. Medicine, ammunition and food were swept into saltwater.
Underwater archeologists said several years ago that they found what they believed to be the site of the L’Aimable wreck, but it is under 30 to 40 feet of silt, three times as deep as the remains of La Belle.
The depth makes it nearly impossible to excavate L’Aimable with today’s technology and without huge infusions of cash, says best-selling adventure writer Clive Cussler, founder of the non-profit, Texas-based National Underwater & Marine Agency. The Cussler group teamed with Texas archeologists to find the probable L’Aimable site, but Cussler has no plans to excavate.
Tales of hardship
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After the colony’s cargo ship sank, La Salle ordered all who disagreed with his leadership to return to France on his third ship, the naval warship Joly. A ship’s engineer, Jean-Baptiste Minet, joined that voyage and returned to France with horrible stories.
La Salle was withholding food and medical treatment, and colonists were dying from malnutrition, disease, overwork and attacks from Indians stirred up by La Salle, Minet reported.
In a report that made its way to French officials, a young crew member of the Joly, Pierre Barthelemy, claimed La Salle murdered several of his own people. Workers who said they were sick were killed in their beds by La Salle, who accused them of feigning illness. He hung or shot people whom he had court-martialed for disobeying orders. Was Barthelemy lying? Historians still debate his claims.
The stories, true or not, reflect a deep hatred toward La Salle.
His last ship, La Belle, ran aground and was wrecked in a storm in Matagorda Bay in 1686, stranding the remaining 40 colonists.
The Texas Historical Commission, which excavated the colony site, is using DNA to investigate those remains, with the goal of someday identifying these French settlers who went into the wild with La Salle.
— Jessie Milligan, FT. Worth Star-Telegram