Columbus and Other Heroes of American Discovery

by N. D'Anvers

Now completely satisfied as to his whereabouts, D’Iberville made his way back to Ship Island in a south-easterly direction, through the Manshac Pass and Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, so named after two French ministers accompanying the expedition. Finding the colonists suffering from the unhealthiness of their situation, their leader sanctioned their removal to the Bay of Biloxi, where a fort was at once erected, which was to insure to the French the peaceful possession of the vast tracts allotted to them by their monarch, extending from the Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo del Norte, now forming the boundary between Texas and Mexico, to the 85th degree of west longitude.

Having thus laid the foundation of what he hoped would become a great French empire in the South, which should gradually extend until it met and coalesced with that of the North, D’Iberville returned to France to win new recruits for his enterprise, leaving his brothers in charge of the infant settlement.

Thus left for a time to its own resources, the little colony struggled on as best it could—the monotony of its life in the barren wastes on which it had been set down broken only by an occasional visit from some missionary, who would appear suddenly at the mouth of the Mississippi, after a wild trip from his distant station, in his birch-bark canoe—until its very existence was threatened by the sudden appearance of two well-armed English vessels, under the command of Coxe, a physician, who had bought up an old patent granting the territory occupied by the French to Robert Heath.

Coxe had come to claim the lands on either side of the Mississippi, and to explore his new possessions. Entering the great highway, he sailed up unmolested for about fifty miles, when he was met by Bienville, also engaged in explorations, who, seeing how powerless he would be to resist the intruder, solved the difficulty by assuring him that the river was not the Mississippi, but another stream belonging to the French.

Suspecting no treachery, Coxe turned back, and the spot which witnessed this somewhat ignominious retreat is still known as the English Turn. The emigrants—most of them Huguenot refugees, who had accompanied the unsuccessful Englishmen—settled in Carolina; and though they subsequently begged to be allowed to join their fellow-countrymen in Louisiana, they were refused permission to do so by the French monarch.

The close of the year witnessed the return of D’Iberville with sixty emigrants from Canada, whom he settled at a spot about fifty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. While engaged in erecting a fort for the protection of the new colony, he was visited by our old friend Tonti, the companion of La Salle’s early explorations, and in company with him he ascended the river as far as the Natchez country, where a third settlement, first called Rosalie, and afterward Natchez, was founded.

A little later, the knowledge of this part of the country was further extended by a trip made by Bienville across the Red River, an important tributary of the Mississippi, to Natchitoches; and about the same time Le Sœur, another adventurous Frenchman, ascended the great river as far as the Falls of St. Anthony, penetrating into the prairies of Missouri, and spending a whole winter among the Iowa Indians.

Unfortunately, these isolated efforts were not seconded by any well-organized attempts to trace the courses of the affluents of the Mississippi, or to gain information respecting the habits of the natives; and the vast tracts on either side of the Father of Waters remained pathless wastes to the European throughout the reign of the French in the Southern States. That reign, however, was not of very long duration. Yellow fever and other terrible complaints, which still have their haunt in the low lands on the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, soon began to work havoc among the settlers at Mobile and the outlying homesteads; and in 1703, only one hundred and fifty of the many emigrants who had settled from time to time in Louisiana survived. In 1719, a fresh impulse, and that of an extraordinary kind, was given to emigration to the most southerly districts owned by France, by that gigantic commercial bubble known as the “Mississippi Scheme,” which, projected by John Law, Comptroller-General of the finances of France in the minority of Louis XV., will long be remembered as having brought about the ruin of thousands. The company to which the working out of Law’s scheme was intrusted was called the Company of the West, and owned the exclusive privilege of trading to the Mississippi, farming the taxes and coining the money of the states to be formed. Thousands of whites and hundreds of negroes to serve as their slaves, were introduced to Louisiana under the auspices of the new company; Bienville was appointed governor in the room of his brother D’Iberville, who had fallen a victim to yellow fever; a site was chosen for the capital of the empire, which was to rise from the graves of so many Europeans, and the foundation stones were laid of the modern city of New Orleans, so called in honor of the then Regent of France.

Only one short year after this imposing beginning, the Mississippi bubble burst; John Law became a bankrupt and an outcast; the lands on the Mississippi, assigned at enormous cost to those whom he had duped, remained unoccupied, and emigration suddenly ceased. The seeds already sown bore good fruit, however, in the gradual extension of the French outposts northward. The settlers who had come out to make their fortunes remained to struggle for bare existence, and the middle of the 18th century found the northern half of Louisiana under the care of Jesuit missionaries, while the seaboard districts were watched over by Capuchin friars. The presence of these zealous teachers of Christianity could not, however, prevent many a terrible struggle with the natives, who again and again made a futile effort to rid themselves of the intruders, the justice of whose appropriation of their lands they naturally failed to see.