A hundred settlers, with a missionary at their head, had already established themselves upon that beautiful strait between Lakes Erie and St. Clair which La Salle, on his first journey, had marked out as an advantageous post. A fort was built, and Detroit became a flourishing settlement, as did also Kaskaskia and Cahokia, two missionary stations on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. The ambition of forming a vast and powerful French American empire was now becoming stronger even than the idea of a Jesuit Theocracy.
Whilst the little settlement was establishing itself at Biloxi, a scheme was formed in London to claim for England the territory granted in 1630, to Robert Heath, under the name of Carolana. William III. had taken Father Hennepin into his pay, who now pretended to have been the first who descended the Mississippi. He had lately published his narrative in London, and added to his former account that of his pretended voyage. On the plea, therefore, of this priority of claim, an English expedition was fitted out under Coxe, a physician of London and a proprietary of New Jersey, who had bought up the old patent of Carolana, and now, with two armed English vessels, set out to explore the mouth of the Mississippi. Bienville, who had been intrusted by his brother D’Iberville to pursue the exploration of the country, was on his return to Biloxi, about fifty miles above the mouth of the river, when, to his great surprise, meeting one of Coxe’s vessels, he resorted to an expedient which soon removed the intruder. He pretended that this river was not the Mississippi, and that the country was under the French supremacy, on which the English captain, instantly turning his ships about, hastened back. The reach of the river where this occurrence took place is called the English Turn to this day. Thus ended the English attempt to establish a claim to the old Carolana; and though William III. declared that he would leap over “twenty stumbling-blocks rather than not effect it,” England never gained any permanent establishment on the Mississippi.
Coxe’s vessels had brought out a number of French Huguenot emigrants, who were landed in Carolina; and these soon after desiring to remove to Louisiana, where their nationality might be preserved, wrote to Sauvolle for this purpose. Sauvolle communicated with the French government, asking merely, on their behalf, liberty of conscience. The reply of the king was characteristic: “He had not driven Protestants from France to make a republic of them in America.”
D’Iberville returned towards the end of the year with sixty Canadians, and early the following, set out to select a situation for a new settlement. While building a fort about fifty miles above the mouth of the river, he was visited by the aged Tonti, the former companion of La Salle, who had come down the Illinois with seven attendants for that purpose. D’Iberville and his brother Bienville, in company with Tonti, now ascended the Great River as far as the country occupied by the Natchez, by whom they were well received; and here, upon a high bluff, a settlement was marked out under the name of Rosalie, now called Natchez.
In May, D’Iberville again returned to France, and Bienville, pursuing his explorations, crossed the Red River to Natchitoches. Gold and mineral wealth were again the great objects of search, but nothing was met with save swampy forests and dismal solitudes; nor could any report of gold be obtained from the natives. La Sueur, in pursuit of this bootless quest, spent the summer and autumn of the same year in ascending the Mississippi as far as the falls of St. Anthony, and then entering the St. Peter’s, reached the prairies of Missouri, and spent the winter among the Towas, that he might in spring take possession of a copper mine.
The settlers of Biloxi, mere hireling adventurers, were not the men to weather through the early hardships of a colony. Whilst France was urging them to search for the precious metals, the fevers incident to such a soil and climate were sweeping them rapidly away. Sauvolle was an early victim; and the command then fell upon the young and adventurous Bienville. When D’Iberville returned from France in 1703, he found but 150 alive, and soon after the colony was removed to the western bank of the Mobile; and this, the first European settlement in the present state of Alabama, continued to be the head-quarters of the colony for the next twenty years. D’Iberville, attacked soon after by yellow fever, escaped narrowly with his life to France, and died at Havanna in 1706. “When he left Louisiana, it was little more than a wilderness, containing about thirty families. The colonists were unwise in their objects. Their scanty number was scattered on discoveries, or among the Indians in quest of furs. There was no quiet agricultural industry. The coast of Biloxi was sandy as the deserts of Lybia; the fort on the delta of the Mississippi was at the mercy of the rising waters; and the buzzing and sting of musquitoes, the hissing of the snakes, the croaking of the frogs, the cries of alligators, seemed to claim the country still as the inheritance of reptiles; whilst, at Mobile, the sighing of the pines and the hopeless character of the barrens warned the emigrants to seek homes more inland.”[[23]]
As regards the condition of the American provinces belonging to the once powerful Spain, it will be sufficient to state that they shared in a great measure the condition of the parent-country. Spain had now no navy, and “foreigners, by means of loans and mortgages, gained more than seven-eighths of the wealth from America, and furnished more than nine-tenths of the merchandise shipped for the colonies. Spanish commerce and manufactures had almost ceased to exist; and its dynasty had become extinct.” A Bourbon was on the throne, and the liberties of the Netherlands being endangered, William III. declared war both against France and Spain.
In the war which commenced with the eighteenth century, the English colonists had for enemies, not alone the French of Canada, but the Spaniards of Florida also. The Spanish settlements in the neighbourhood of St. Augustine were not very extensive, it is true; and that of Pensacola was of later date. The tribes of Appalachees, inhabiting what is now called Middle Florida, and who had received some rudiments of civilisation from Spanish missionaries, were employed in agriculture, and as herdsmen. The powerful tribes of the confederated Creek Indians occupied the territory south and south-west of the Savannah and the Alleganies, bordering on the English settlements of South Carolina, and forming now the State of Georgia. The country south-west of the Alleganies was occupied by the equally formidable Cherokees, who claimed as their hunting-ground the whole country as far as the Kenhawa and the Ohio; between these and the English settlements of the two Carolinas, was the territory of Yamasees, the Catawbas, and the Tuscaroras.
The governor of South Carolina at this time was James Moore, successor to Joseph Blake, “a needy and ambitious man,” who had enriched himself by kidnapping Indians and selling them as slaves. The hope of Indian and Spanish captives induced this man, as soon as the news of the war reached Carolina, to undertake an expedition against St. Augustine. The town was very soon taken, but the garrison retired to the fort, which was strong and well built; and before this could be attacked the assailants had to send for heavy artillery from Jamaica. In the meantime an Indian runner was sent with the tidings to Bienville at Mobile, who communicated the intelligence to the Spanish viceroy at Havanna, and two Spanish ships of war were immediately despatched to St. Augustine, at the sight of which Moore abandoned his vessels and fled by land. This expedition burdened Carolina with debt, and caused the issue of her first paper money.
Again, at the close of 1705, Moore, at the head of fifty white volunteers and about 1,000 Indian allies of the Creek nation, marched through the forests which De Soto had traversed, and surprised the settlements near St. Mark’s, where, surrounded by their herds of cattle, the semi-civilised Indians lived in peaceful allegiance to the Spanish. It was the middle of December, when the unexpected invaders came down upon the quiet villagers; and though they could not take the fort, they plundered the villages, burning and robbing the churches. A barefoot friar, the only white man, came forward to beg for mercy; but about 100 women and children, and fifty warriors were seized as slaves. The fort, however, could not be taken, and the Indian chief purchased peace with the plate of his church and ten horse-loads of provisions. Two thousand of these Indians removed to the banks of the Altamaha, under the jurisdiction of Carolina, and their country was given up to the Lower Creek Indians, allies of the English. A century and a quarter afterwards, when General Jackson expelled the Indians from this territory, traces were found of these Spanish missionary villages, overgrown with forest.[[24]] Thus did the English power extend itself to the Gulf of Mexico, and obtain a claim to that region which soon after became the province of Georgia.