Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America

History, travelogue, and memoir combine in this illuminating journey in the footsteps of the great explorer La Salle.

This is the extraordinary account of a personal and historical quest in which Philip Marchand retraces the seventeenth-century explorations of La Salle while he searches in the present day for vestiges of France’s lost North American legacy.

After he explored the Great Lakes and the entire Mississippi, La Salle was murdered by his own men when he led them on a disa…