René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was a 17th-century French explorer and fur trader in North America. He explored the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, and the Mississippi River. He is best known for an early 1682 expedition in which he canoed the lower Mississippi River from the mouth of the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico; there, on 9 April 1682, he claimed the Mississippi River basin for France after giving it the name La Louisiane. One source states that "he acquired for France the most fertile half of the North American continent". A later ill-fated expedition to the Gulf coast of Mexico gave the United States a claim to Texas in the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. La Salle was assassinated in 1687 during that expedition.

The North American fur trade is the (typically) historical commercial trade of furs and other goods in North America, predominantly in the eastern provinces of Canada and the northeastern American colonies. The trade was initiated mainly through French, Dutch and English settlers and explorers in collaboration with various First Nations tribes of the region, such as the Wyandot-Huron and the Iroquois; ultimately, the fur trade's financial and cultural benefits would see the operation quickly expanding coast-to-coast and into more of the continental United States and Alaska.