Le Sueur, who by express orders had accompanied Iberville on his second voyage, was holding a fort on the upper Mississippi at the same time that “Juchereau de Saint-Denys,[42] lieutenant-général de la juridiction de Montréal,” was granted permission to proceed from Canada with twenty-four men to the Mississippi,[43] there to establish tanneries and to mine for lead and copper. One Nicolas de la Salle, a purser in the naval service, was sent over to perform the duties of commissaire. The office of commissaire-ordonnateur was the equivalent of the intendant,—a counterpoise to the governor and a spy upon his actions. La Salle’s relation to this office was apparently the same as Bienville’s to the position of governor. A purser performed the duties of commissaire; a midshipman, those of commanding officer. Of course La Salle’s presence in the colony could only breed trouble; and we find him reporting that “Iberville, Bienville, and Chateauguay, the three brothers, are thieves and knaves capable of all sorts of misdeeds.” Bienville, on his part, complains that “M. de la Salle, purser, would not give Chateauguay pay for services performed by order of the minister.” This state of affairs needed amendment. Iberville had never reported in the colony after his appointment in 1703 as commander-in-chief. Bienville had continued at the actual head of affairs. In February, 1708, it was ascertained in the colony that M. de Muys had started from France to supersede Bienville, but had died on the way.
M. Diron d’Artaguette, who had been appointed commissaire-ordonnateur,[44] with orders to examine into the conduct of the officers of the colony and to report upon the condition of its affairs, arrived in Mobile in February, 1708. An attempt had apparently been made to organize Louisiana on the same system as prevailed in the other colonies. Artaguette made his investigation, and returned to France in 1711. During his brief stay the monotony of the record had been varied by the raid of an English privateer upon Dauphin (formerly Massacre) Island, where a settlement had been made in 1707 and fortified in 1709. The peripatetic capital had been driven, by the manifest unfitness of the situation, from Biloxi to a point on the Mobile River, from which it was now compelled by floods to move to higher lands eight leagues from the mouth of the river. No variation was rung upon the chronic complaint of scarcity of provisions. The frequent changes in the position of headquarters, lack of faith in the permanence of the establishment, and the severe attacks of fever endured each year by many of the settlers, discouraged those who might otherwise have given their attention to agriculture. To meet this difficulty, Bienville proposed to send Indians to the islands, there to be exchanged for negroes. If his plan had met with approval, perhaps he might have made the colony self-supporting, and thus have avoided in 1710 the scandal of subsisting his men by scattering them among the very savages whom he wished to sell into slavery. It is not to be wondered at that the growth of the colony under these circumstances was very slow. In 1701 the number of inhabitants was stated at one hundred and fifty. In 1708 La Salle reported the population as composed of a garrison of one hundred and twenty-two persons, including priests, workmen, and boys; seventy-seven inhabitants, men, women, and children; and eighty Indian slaves. In 1712 there were four hundred persons, including twenty negroes. Some of the colonists had accumulated a little property, and Bienville reported that he was obliged to watch them lest they should go away.
On the 14th day of September, 1712, and of his reign the seventieth year, Louis, by the grace of God king of France and Navarre, granted to Sieur Antony Crozat the exclusive right to trade in all the lands possessed by him and bounded by New Mexico and by the lands of the English of Carolina; in all the establishments, ports, havens, rivers, and principally the port and haven of the Isle of Dauphin, heretofore called Massacre, the River St. Louis, heretofore called the Mississippi, from the edge of the sea as far as the Illinois, together with the River of St. Philip, heretofore called the Missouri, and of the St. Jerome, heretofore called the Ouabache, with all the countries, territories, lakes within land, and the rivers which fall directly or indirectly into that part of the River St. Louis. Louisiana thus defined was to remain a separate colony, subordinate, however, to the Government of New France. The exclusive grant of trade was to last for fifteen years. Mines were granted in perpetuity subject to a royalty, and to forfeiture if abandoned. Lands could be taken for settlement, manufactures, or for cultivation; but if abandoned they reverted to the Crown. It was provided in Article XIV., “if for the farms and plantations which the said Sieur Crozat wishes to carry on he finds it desirable to have some negroes in the said country of Louisiana, he may send a ship each year to trade for them directly on the coast of Guinea, taking a permit from the Guinea Company so to do. He may sell these negroes to the inhabitants of the colony of Louisiana, and we forbid all other companies and persons whatsoever, under any pretence whatsoever, to introduce any negroes or traffic for them in the said country, nor shall the said Crozat carry any negroes elsewhere.”
Crozat was a man of commercial instinct,—developed, however, only to the standard of the times. The grant to him of these extensive privileges was acknowledged in the patent to have been made for financial favors received by the King, and also because the King believed that a successful business man would be able to manage the affairs of the colony. The value of the grant was dependent upon the extent to which Crozat could develop the commerce of the settlement; and he seems to have set to work in earnest to test its possibilities. The journals of the colonists now record the arrivals of vessels with stores, provisions, and passengers. Supplies were maintained during this commercial administration upon a more liberal basis. The fear of starvation was for the time postponed, and the colonists were spared the humiliation of depending for means of subsistence upon the labor of those whom they termed savages. Merchandise was imported, and only purchasers were needed to complete the transaction. There being no possible legal competition for peltries within the limits of the colony, the market price was what the monopolist chose to pay. Louis XIV. had forbidden “all persons and companies of all kinds, whatever their quality and condition, and whatever the pretext might be, from trading in Louisiana under pain of confiscation of goods and ships, and perhaps of other and severer punishments.” Yet so oblivious were the English traders of their impending fate that they continued to trade among the tribes which were friendly to them, and at times even went so far as to encroach upon the trade with the tribes allied to the French and fairly within French lines. So negligent were the coureurs de bois of their own interest, that when Crozat put the price of peltries below what the English and Spanish traders were paying, they would work their way to Charleston and to Pensacola. So indifferent were the Spaniards to a commerce not carried on in their own ships, and so thoroughly did they believe in the principles of the grant to Crozat, that they would not permit his vessels to trade in their ports. Thus it happened that La Mothe Cadillac, who had arrived in the colony in May, 1713, bearing his own commission as governor, was soon convinced that the commerce of the colony was limited to the sale of vegetables to the Spaniards at Pensacola, and the interchange of a few products with the islands. His disappointment early showed itself in his despatches. His selection for the post was unfortunate. By persistent pressure he had succeeded while in Canada in convincing the Court of the necessity for a post at Detroit and of the propriety of putting La Mothe Cadillac in charge of it. He had upon his hands at that time a chronic war with the priests, whose work he belittled in his many letters. His reputation in this respect was so well known that the inhabitants of Montreal in a protest against the establishment of the post at Detroit alleged that he was “known not to be in the odor of sanctity.” He had carried his prejudices with him to that isolated post, and had flooded the archives with correspondence, memoranda, and reports stamped with evidence of his impatience and lack of policy. The vessel which brought him to Louisiana brought also another instalment of marriageable girls. Apparently they were not so attractive as the first lot. Some of them remained single so long that the officials were evidently doubtful about finding them husbands. By La Mothe’s orders, according to Penicaut, the MM. de la Loire were instructed to establish a trading-post at Natchez in 1713. A post in Alabama called Fort Toulouse was established in 1714.
Saint-Denys in 1714 and again in 1716 went to Mexico. His first expedition was evidently for the purpose of opening commercial relations with the Spaniards. No signs of Spanish occupation were met by the party till they reached the vicinity of the Rio Grande. This visit apparently roused the Spaniards to the necessity of occupying Texas, for they immediately sent out an expedition from Mexico to establish a number of missions in that region. Saint-Denys, who on his return accompanied this expedition, was evidently satisfied that the Spanish authorities would permit traffic with the posts in New Mexico.[45] A trading expedition was promptly organized by him in the fall of 1716 and despatched within a few months of his return. This expedition on its way to the presidio on the Rio Grande passed through several Indian towns in the “province of Lastekas,” where they found Spanish priests and Spanish soldiers.[46] Either Saint-Denys had been deceived, or the Spanish Government had changed its views. The goods of the expedition were seized and confiscated. Saint-Denys himself went to Mexico to secure their release, if possible. His companions returned to Louisiana. Meantime La Mothe had in January, 1717, sent a sergeant and six soldiers to occupy the Island of Natchitoches.
While the French and Spanish traders and soldiers were settling down on the Red River and in Texas, in the posts and missions which were to determine the boundaries between Texas and Louisiana, La Mothe himself was not idle. In 1715 he went up to Illinois in search of silver mines. He brought back lead ore, but no silver. In 1716 the tribe of the Natchez showed signs of restlessness, and attacked some of the French. Bienville was sent with a small force of thirty-four soldiers and fifteen sailors to bring this powerful tribe to terms. He succeeded by deceit in accomplishing what he could not have done by fighting, and actually compelled the Indians, through fear for the lives of some chiefs whom he had treacherously seized, to construct a fort on their own territory, the sole purpose of which was to hold them in awe. From that date a garrison was maintained at Natchez. Bienville, who was then commissioned as “Commandant of the Mississippi and its tributaries,” was expected to make this point his headquarters. The jealousy between himself and La Mothe had ripened into open quarrel. The latter covered reams of paper with his crisp denunciations of affairs in Louisiana, until Crozat, worn out with his complaints, finally wrote, “I am of opinion that all the disorders in the colony of which M. de la Mothe complains proceed from his own maladministration of affairs.”
No provision was made in the early days of the colony for the establishment of a legal tribunal; military law alone prevailed. By an edict issued Dec. 18, 1712, the governor and commissaire-ordonnateur were constituted a tribunal for three years from the day of its meeting, with the same powers as the councils of Santo Domingo and Martinique. The tribunal was afterward re-established with increased numbers and more definite powers.
On the 23d day of August, 1717, the Regent accepted a proposition made to him by Sieur Antony Crozat to remit the remainder of the term of his exclusive privilege. Although it must have wounded the pride of a man like Crozat to acknowledge that so gigantic a scheme, fraught with such exaggerated hopes and possibilities, was a complete failure, yet there is no record of his having undertaken to save himself by means of the annual shipload of negroes which he was authorized, under Article XIV. of his grant, to import. The late King had simply granted him permission to traffic in human beings. It remained for the Regent representing the Grand Monarque’s great-grandson to convert this permission into an absolute condition in the grant to the Company to which Crozat’s rights were assigned. The population of the colony was estimated at seven hundred of all ages, sexes, and colors, not including natives, when in March, 1717, the affairs of government were turned over to L’Epinay, the successor of La Mothe.