on the eve of the treaty of Utrecht, expressly asserted in the royal grant of the commerce of the province. Weary of fruitless efforts, in September, 1712, Louis XIV. had assigned the exclusive trade of the unbounded territory to Anthony Crozat, a French merchant, who had "prospered in opulence to the astonishment of all the world." La Motte Cadillac, now the royal governor of Louisiana, became his partner; and the merchant proprietary and the founder of Detroit sought fortune by discovering mines and encroaching on the colonial monopolies of Spain.

The latter attempt met with no success whatever. Hardly had the officers of the new administration, in May, 1713, landed at Dauphine Island, when they found that every Spanish harbor in the Gulf of Mexico was closed against the vessels of Crozat. Nor could commercial relations be instituted by land. Even liberty of commerce across the wilderness was sternly refused. From the mines of Louisiana it was still hoped to obtain "great quantities of gold and silver." Two pieces of silver ore, left at Kaskaskia by a traveller from Mexico, were exhibited to Cadillac as the produce of a mine in Illinois; and he hurried up the river, to be, in his turn, disappointed, finding in Missouri abundance of the purest ore of lead, but neither silver nor gold.

In 1714, on the head waters of the Alabama, at the junction of the Coosa and the Tallapoosa, with the aid of a band of Choctas, Fort Toulouse, a small military post, was built and garrisoned. After a short period of hostilities, which sprung, in part, from the influence of English traders among the Chickasas, the too powerful Bienville, in 1716, chanted the calumet with the great chief of the Natchez; and Fort Rosalie, built chiefly by the natives, protected the French commercial establishment in their village. Such was the origin of the city of Natchez. In the Mississippi valley, it takes rank, in point of age, of every settlement south of Illinois.

Yet for the advancement of the colony Crozat ac

1717.] LOUISIANA AND THE MISSISSIPPI COMPANY. 243

complished nothing. The Indians were too numerous to be resisted by his factors. The English gradually appropriated the trade with the natives; and every Frenchman in Louisiana, except his agents, fomented opposition to the profitless but fatal monopoly of the Parisian merchant. Crozat resigned his charter. On receiving it, Louisiana possessed twenty-eight French families in 1717, when he abandoned it, the troops sent by the king, joined to the colonists, did not swell the inhabitants of the colony to more than seven hundred, including persons of every age, sex, and color.

When Crozat resigned the commerce of Louisiana, it was transferred to the Western company, better known as the company of Mississippi, instituted under the auspices of John Law, who had already planned the whimsically gigantic project of collecting all the gold. and silver of the kingdom into one bank. Although the union of the bank with the hazards of a commercial company was an omen of the fate of "the system," public credit seemed restored as if by a miracle. The ill success of La Salle, of Iberville, and Crozat, the fruitlessness of the long search for the mines of St. Barbe, were notorious; yet tales were revived of the wealth of Louisiana; its ingots of gold had been seen in Paris. The vision of a fertile empire, with its plantations and cities, the gains from silver mines and mountains of gold, were blended in the French mind into one boundless promise of untold treasures.

It was in September, 1717, that the Western company obtained its grant. On the twenty-fifth day of the following August, after a long but happy voyage, the Victory, the Duchess of Noailles, and the Mary, bearing eight hundred emigrants for Louisiana, chanted their Te Deum as they cast anchor near Dauphine Island. Already had Bienville, in the midsummer of 1718, as he descended the Mississippi, selected on its banks a site for the capital of the new empire; and from the prince who denied God, and "trembled at a star," the dissolute but generous regent of France, the promised

city received the name of New Orleans. Instead of ascending the river in the ships, the emigrants disembarked on the crystalline sands of Dauphine Island, to make their way as they could to the lands that had been ceded to them. Some perished for want of enterprise, some from the climate; others prospered by their indomitable energy. The Canadian Du Tissenet, purchasing a compass, and taking an escort of fourteen Canadians, went fearlessly from Dauphine Island, by way of the Mobile River, to Quebec, and returned to the banks of the Mississippi with his family. The most successful colonists of Louisiana were the hardy emigrants from Canada, who brought with them little beyond a staff and the coarse clothes that covered them.

Of the recent emigrants from France, eighty convicts were sent amongst the coppices that overspread New Orleans, to prepare room for a few tents and cottages. At the end of more than three years, the place was still a wilderness spot, where two hundred persons, sent to construct a city, had but encamped among unsubdued canebrakes. And yet Charlevoix, the enlightened traveller, held America happy, as the land in which the patriot could sigh over no decay, could point in sorrow to no ruins of a more prosperous age; and, with cheerful eye, looking into futurity, he predicted the opulence and vastness of the city which was destined to become the emporium of the noblest valley in the world. Still the emigrants of the company, though, in the winter of 1718, one of their ships had sailed up the river, blindly continued to disembark on the miserable coast; and, even in 1721, Bienville himself a second time established the head quarters of Louisiana at Biloxi.

Meantime Alberoni, the active minister of Spain, having, contrary to the interests of France and of Spain, involved the two countries in a war, De Serigny arrived in February of 1719, with orders to take possession of Pensacola. This is the bay called, in the days of De Soto, Anchusi, afterwards Saint Mary,

1719.] LOUISIANA AND THE MISSISSIPPI COMPANY. 245

and Saint Mary of Galve. In 1696, Don Andrés de Arriola had built upon its margin a fort, a church, and a few houses, in a place without commerce or agriculture, or productive labor of any kind. By the capture of the fort, which, after five hours' resistance, in May, 1719, surrendered, the French hoped to extend their power along the Gulf of Mexico from the Rio del Norte to the Atlantic. But within forty days the Spaniards recovered the town, and attempted, in their turn, to conquer the French posts on Dauphine Island and on the Mobile. In September, the French recovered Pensacola, which, by the treaty of 1721, reverted to Spain. The tidings of peace were welcomed at Biloxi with heartfelt joy.

During the period of hostility, La Harpe, in a letter to the nearest Spanish governor, had claimed "Texas to the Del Norte as a part of Louisiana." France was too feeble to stretch its colonies far to the west; but its rights were esteemed so clear, that, in time of peace, the attempt to occupy the country was renewed. This second attempt of Bernard de la Harpe to plant a colony near the Bay of Matagorda had no other results than to incense the natives against the French, and to stimulate the Spaniards to the occupation of the country by a fort. Yet the French ever regarded the mouth of the Del Norte as the western limit of Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico; and English geography recognized the claim.

But a change had taken place in the fortunes of the Mississippi company. By its connection with the bank of Law, its first attempts at colonization were conducted with careless prodigality. The richest prairies, the most inviting fields, in the southern valley of the Mississippi, were conceded to companies or to individuals who sought principalities in the New World. Thus it was hoped that at least six thousand white colonists would be established in Louisiana. To Law himself there was conceded on the Arkansas one of those vast prairies, of which the wide-spreading waves of verdure

are bounded only by the azure of the sky. There he designed to plant a city and villages; his investments, in 1719, already amounted to a million and a half of livres; through the company, which he directed, possessing a monopoly of the slave trade for the French colonies, he had purchased three hundred negroes; mechanics from France, and a throng of German emigrants, were engaged in his service or as his tenants; his commissioners lavished gifts on the tribes with whom they smoked the calumet.

But the downfall of "the system" of Law, which left France impoverished, public and private credit subverted, the income of capitalists annihilated, and labor pining without employment, abruptly curtailed expenditures for Louisiana; and its very name was in France involved in disgrace. Instead of the splendid visions of opulence, the disenchanted public would now see only unwholesome marshes, which were the tombs of emigrants.

Yet a colony was already planted, destined to survive all dangers. The Alabama River had been a favorite line of communication with the north. From the easier connection of Mobile with the sea, it remained a principal post; but, in August of 1723, the quarters of Bienville were transferred to New Orleans. Thus the central point of French power, after hovering round Ship Island and Dauphine Island, the Bays of Biloxi and Mobile, was at last established on the banks of the Mississippi; and the emigrants to Arkansas gathered into settlements along the river nearer to New Orleans.

The villages of the Natchez, planted in the midst of the most fertile climes of the south-west, rose near the banks of the Mississippi. Each was distinguished by a receptacle for the dead. In the sacred building, of an oval shape, having a circumference of one hundred feet, a simple hut, without a window, and with a low and narrow opening on the side for the only door, were garnered up the choicest fetiches of the tribe, of which some were moulded from clay and baked in the