Early Life
Little is known of the early life of Manuel Lisa, but he is believed to have been born in 1772 in New Orleans, then part of Spanish Louisiana. It was ceded to Spain by France after the British victory in the Seven Years War, when the British gained Florida in exchange with Spain for French lands west of the Mississippi River. His father, Christoval de Lisa, was born in Murcia, Spain, while his mother, Maria Ignacia Rodriguez, was born to a colonial family in St. Augustine, Florida. It is likely that Christoval came to Spanish Louisiana in the service of the governor Alejandro O'Reilly, who started his tenure in 1769.
By 1789, Manuel Lisa was trading on the Mississippi River in New Madrid, Missouri; the next recorded mention of Manuel Lisa was again in New Madrid, after he had returned from trading along the Wabash River.
Read more about this topic: Manuel Lisa
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“They think how one life hums, revolves and toils,
One cog in a golden singing hive:”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)