CHAPTER 13
1697-1750. 

LOUISIANA. 
THE MISSISSIPPI TO BE OCCUPIED,  ENGLISH RIVALRY,  IBERVILLE,  BIENVILLE,  HUGUENOTS,  VIEWS OF LOUIS XIV,  WIVES FOR THE COLONY,  SLAVES,  LA MOTHE-CADILLAC,  PATERNAL GOVERNMENT,  CROZAT'S MONOPOLY,  FACTIONS,  THE MISSISSIPPI COMPANY,  NEW ORLEANS,  THE BUBBLE BURSTS,  INDIAN WARS,  THE COLONY FIRMLY ESTABLISHED,  THE TWO HEADS OF NEW FRANCE. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century an event took place that was to have a great influence on the future of French America.  This was the occupation by France of the mouth of the Mississippi, and the vindication of her claim to the vast and undefined regions which La Salle had called Louisiana.  La Salle's schemes had come to nought, but they were revived, seven years after his death, by his lieutenant, the gallant and faithful Henri de Tonty, who urged the seizure of Louisiana for three reasons,—first, as a base of attack upon Mexico; secondly, as a dépôt for the furs and lead ore of the interior; and thirdly, as the only means of preventing the English from becoming masters of the West. 

Three years later, the Sieur de Rémonville, a friend of La Salle, proposed the formation of a company for the settlement of Louisiana, and called for immediate action as indispensable to anticipate the English.  The English were, in fact, on the point of taking possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, and were prevented only by the prompt intervention of the rival nation. 

If they had succeeded, colonies would have grown up on the Gulf of Mexico after the type of those already planted along the Atlantic: voluntary immigrants would have brought to a new home their old inheritance of English freedom; would have ruled themselves by laws of their own making, through magistrates of their own choice; would have depended on their own efforts, and not on government help, in the invigorating consciousness that their destinies were in their own hands, and that they themselves, and not others, were to gather the fruits of their toils.  Out of conditions like these would have sprung communities, n

But the principles of absolutism, and not those of a regulated liberty, were to rule in Louisiana.  The new French colony was to be the child of the Crown.  Cargoes of emigrants, willing or unwilling, were to be shipped by authority to the fever-stricken banks of the Mississippi,—cargoes made up in part of those whom fortune and their own defects had sunk to dependence; to whom labor was strange and odious, but who dreamed of gold mines and pearl fisheries, and wealth to be won in the New World and spent in the Old; who wore the shackles of a paternal despotism which they were told to regard as of divine institution; who were at the mercy of military rulers set over them by the King, and agreeing in nothing except in enforcing the mandates of arbitrary power and the withering maxim that the labor of the colonist was due, not to himself, but to his masters.  It remains to trace briefly the results of such conditions. 

The before-mentioned scheme of Rémonville for settling the Mississippi country had no result.  In the next year the gallant Le Moyne d'Iberville—who has been called the Cid, or, more fitly, the Jean Bart, of Canada—offered to carry out the schemes of La Salle and plant a colony in Louisiana.  One thing had become clear,—France must act at once, or lose the Mississippi.  Already there was a movement in London to seize upon it, under a grant to two noblemen.  Iberville's offer was accepted; he was ordered to build a fort at the mouth of the great river, and leave a garrison to hold it.  He sailed with two frigates, the "Badine" and the "Marin," and towards the end of January, 1699, reached Pensacola.  Here he found two Spanish ships, which would not let him enter the harbor.  Spain, no less than England, was bent on making good her claim to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, and the two ships had come from Vera Cruz on this errand.  Three hundred men had been landed, and a stockade fort was already built.  Iberville left the Spaniards undisturbed and unchallenged, and felt his way westward along the coasts of Alabama and Mississippi, exploring and sounding as he went.  At the beginning of March his boats were caught in a strong muddy current of fresh water, and he saw that he had reached the object of his search, the "fatal river" of the unfortunate La Salle.  He entered it, encamped, on the night of the third, twelve leagues above its mouth, climbed a solitary tree, and could see nothing but broad flats of bushes and canebrakes. 

Still pushing upward against the current, he reached in eleven days a village of the Bayagoula Indians, where he found the chief attired in a blue capote, which was probably put on in honor of the white strangers, and which, as the wearer declared, had been given him by Henri de Tonty, on his descent of the Mississippi in search of La Salle, thirteen years before.  Young Le Moyne de Bienville, who accompanied his brother Iberville in a canoe, brought him, some time after, a letter from Tonty which the writer had left in the hands of another chief, to be delivered to La Salle in case of his arrival, and which Bienville had bought for a hatchet.  Iberville welcomed it as convincing proof that the river he had entered was in truth the Mississippi.  After pushing up the stream till the twenty-fourth, he returned to the ships by way of lakes Maurepas and Ponchartrain. 

Iberville now repaired to the harbor of Biloxi, on the coast of the present State of Mississippi.  Here he built a small stockade fort, where he left eighty men, under the Sieur de Sauvolle, to hold the country for Louis XIV. ; and this done, he sailed for France.  Thus the first foundations of Louisiana were laid in Mississippi. 

Bienville, whom his brother had left at Biloxi as second in command, was sent by Sauvolle on an exploring expedition up the Mississippi with five men in two canoes.  At the bend of the river now called English Turn,—Tour à l'Anglais,—below the site of New Orleans, he found an English corvette of ten guns, having, as passengers, a number of French Protestant families taken on board from the Carolinas, with the intention of settling on the Mississippi.  The commander, Captain Louis Bank, declared that his vessel was one of three sent from London by a company formed jointly of Englishmen and Huguenot refugees for the purpose of founding a colony.  Though not quite sure that they were upon the Mississippi, they were on their way up the stream to join a party of Englishmen said to be among the Chickasaws, with whom they were trading for Indian slaves.  Bienville assured Bank that he was not upon the Mississippi, but on another river belonging to King Louis, who had a strong fort there and several settlements.  "The too-credulous Englishman," says a French writer, "believed these inventions and turned back. " First, however, a French engineer in the service of Bank contrived to have an interview with Bienville, and gave him a petition to the King of France, signed by four hundred Huguenots who had taken refuge in the Carolinas after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  The petitioners begged that they might have leave to settle in Louisiana, with liberty of conscience, under the French Crown.  In due time they got their answer.  The King replied, through the minister, Ponchartrain, that he had not expelled heretics from France in order that they should set up a republic in America.  Thus, by the bigotry that had been the bane of Canada and of France herself, Louis XIV.  threw away the opportunity of establishing a firm and healthy colony at the mouth of the Mississippi. 

So threatening was the danger that England would seize the country, that Iberville had scarcely landed in France when he was sent back with a reinforcement.  The colonial views of the King may be gathered from his instructions to his officer.  Iberville was told to seek out diligently the best places for establishing pearl-fisheries, though it was admitted that the pearls of Louisiana were uncommonly bad.  He was also to catch bison calves, make a fenced park to hold them, and tame them for the sake of their wool, which was reputed to be of value for various fabrics.  Above all, he was to look for mines, the finding of which the document declares to be "la grande affaire. "

On the eighth of January, Iberville reached Biloxi, and soon after went up the Mississippi to that remarkable tribe of sun-worshippers, the Natchez, whose villages were on and near the site of the city that now bears their name.  Some thirty miles above he found a kindred tribe, the Taensas, whose temple took fire during his visit, when, to his horror, he saw five living infants thrown into the flames by their mothers to appease the angry spirits. 

Retracing his course, he built a wooden redoubt near one of the mouths of the Mississippi to keep out the dreaded English. 

In the next year he made a third voyage, and ordered the feeble establishment at Biloxi to be moved to the bay of Mobile.  This drew a protest from the Spaniards, who rested their claims to the country on the famous bull of Pope Alexander VI.  The question was referred to the two Crowns.  Louis XIV. , a stanch champion of the papacy when his duties as a Catholic did not clash with his interests as a king, refused submission to the bull, insisted that the Louisiana country was his, and declared that he would hold fast to it because he was bound, as a son of Holy Church, to convert the Indians and keep out the English heretics.  Spain was then at peace with France, and her new King, the Duc d'Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. , needed the support of his powerful kinsman; hence his remonstrance against French encroachment was of the mildest. 

Besides Biloxi and Mobile Bay, the French formed a third establishment at Dauphin Island.  The Mississippi itself, which may be called the vital organ of the colony, was thus far neglected, being occupied by no settlement and guarded only by a redoubt near one of its mouths. 

Of the emigrants sent out by the court to the new land of promise, the most valuable by far were a number of Canadians who had served under Iberville at Hudson Bay.  The rest were largely of the sort who are described by that officer as "beggars sent out to enrich themselves," and who expected the government to feed them while they looked for pearls and gold mines.  The paternal providence of Versailles, mindful of their needs, sent them, in 1704, a gift of twenty marriageable girls, described as "nurtured in virtue and piety, and accustomed to work. " Twenty-three more came in the next year from the same benignant source, besides seventy-five soldiers, five priests, and two nuns.  Food, however, was not sent in proportion to the consumers; and as no crops were raised in Louisiana, famine and pestilence followed, till the starving colonists were forced to live on shell-fish picked up along the shores. 

Disorder and discord filled the land of promise.  Nicolas de la Salle, the commissaire ordonnateur, an official answering to the Canadian intendant, wrote to the minister Ponchartrain that Iberville and his brothers, Bienville and Chateauguay, were "thieves and knaves. " La Vente, curé of Mobile, joined in the cry against Bienville, and stirred soldiers and settlers to disaffection; but the bitterest accuser of that truly valuable officer was the worthy matron who held the unenviable post of directress of the "King's girls,"—that is, the young women sent out as wives for the colonists.  It seems that she had matrimonial views for herself as well as for her charge; and she wrote to Ponchartrain that Major Boisbriant, commander of the garrison, would certainly have married her if Bienville had not interfered and dissuaded him.  "It is clear," she adds, "that M.  de Bienville has not the qualities necessary for governing the colony. "

Bienville was now chief in authority.  Charges of peculation and other offences poured in against him, and at last, though nothing was proved, one De Muys was sent to succeed him, with orders to send him home a prisoner if on examination the accusations should prove to be true.  De Muys died on the voyage.  D'Artaguette, the new intendant, proceeded to make the inquiry, but refused to tell Bienville the nature of the charges against him, saying that he had orders not to do so.  Nevertheless, when he had finished his investigation he reported to the minister that the accused was innocent; on which Nicolas de la Salle, whom he had supplanted as intendant, wrote to Ponchartrain that D'Artaguette had deceived him, being no better than Bienville himself.  La Salle further declared that Barrot, the surgeon of the colony, was an ignoramus, and that he made money by selling the medicines supplied by the King to cure his Louisianian subjects.  Such were the transatlantic workings of the paternalism of Versailles. 

Bienville, who had been permitted to resume his authority, paints the state of the colony to his masters, and tells them that the inhabitants are dying of hunger,—not all, however, for he mentions a few exceptional cases of prosperity.  These were certain thrifty colonists from Rochelle, who, says Bienville, have grown rich by keeping dram-shops, and now want to go back to France; but he has set a watch over them, thinking it just that they should be forced to stay in the colony.  This was to add the bars of a prison to the other attractions of the new home. 

As the colonists would not work, there was an attempt to make Indian slaves work for them; but as these continually ran off, Bienville proposed to open a barter with the French West Indies, giving three red slaves for two black ones,—an exchange which he thought would be mutually advantageous, since the Indians, being upon islands, could no longer escape.  The court disapproved the plan, on the ground that the West Indians would give only their worst negroes in exchange, and that the only way to get good ones was to fetch them from Guinea. 

Complaints against Bienville were renewed till the court sent out La Mothe-Cadillac to succeed him, with orders to examine the charges against his predecessor, whom it was his interest to condemn, in order to keep the governorship.  In his new post, Cadillac displayed all his old faults; began by denouncing the country in unmeasured terms, and wrote in his usual sarcastic vein to the colonial minister: "I have seen the garden on Dauphin Island, which had been described to me as a terrestrial paradise.  I saw there three seedling pear-trees, three seedling apple-trees, a little plum-tree about three feet high, with seven bad plums on it, a vine some thirty feet long, with nine bunches of grapes, some of them withered or rotten and some partly ripe, about forty plants of French melons, and a few pumpkins.  This is M.  d'Artaguette's terrestrial paradise, M.  de Rémonville's Pomona, and M.  de Mandeville's Fortunate Islands.  Their stories are mere fables. " Then he slanders the soil, which, he declares, will produce neither grain nor vegetables. 

D'Artaguette, no longer fancying himself in Eden, draws a dismal picture of the state of the colony.  There are, he writes, only ten or twelve families who cultivate the soil.  The inhabitants, naturally lazy, are ruined by the extravagance of their wives.  "It is necessary to send out girls and laboring-men.  I am convinced that we shall easily discover mines when persons are sent us who understand that business. "

The colonists felt no confidence in the future of Louisiana.  The King was its sole support, and if, as was likely enough, he should tire of it, their case would be deplorable.  When Bienville ruled over them, they had used him as their scapegoat; but that which made the colony languish was not he, but the vicious system it was his business to enforce.  The royal edicts and arbitrary commands that took the place of law proceeded from masters thousands of miles away, who knew nothing of the country, could not understand its needs, and scarcely tried to do so. 

In 1711, though the mischievous phantom of gold and silver mines still haunted the colony, we find it reported that the people were beginning to work, and were planting tobacco.  The King, however, was losing patience with a dependency that cost him endless expense and trouble, and brought little or nothing in return,—and this at a time when he had a costly and disastrous war on his hands, and was in no mood to bear supernumerary burdens.  The plan of giving over a colony to a merchant, or a company of merchants, was not new.  It had been tried in other French colonies with disastrous effect.  Yet it was now tried again.  Louisiana was farmed out for fifteen years to Antoine Crozat, a wealthy man of business.  The countries made over to him extended from the British colonies on the east to New Mexico on the west, and the Rio del Norte on the south, including the entire region watered by the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, and their tributaries, as far north as the Illinois.  In comparison with this immense domain, which was all included under the name of Louisiana, the present State so called is but a small patch on the American map. 

To Crozat was granted a monopoly of the trade, wholesale and retail, domestic and foreign, of all these countries, besides the product of all mines, after deducting one-fourth reserved for the King.  He was empowered to send one vessel a year to Guinea for a cargo of slaves.  The King was to pay the governor and other Crown officers, and during the first nine years the troops also; though after that time Crozat was to maintain them till the end of his term. 

In consideration of these and other privileges, the grantee was bound to send to Louisiana a specified number of settlers every year.  His charter provided that the royal edicts and the Coutume de Paris should be the law of the colony, to be administered by a council appointed by the King. 

When Louisiana was thus handed over to a speculator for a term of years, it needed no prophet to foretell that he would get all he could out of it, and put as little into it as possible.  When Crozat took possession of the colony, the French court had been thirteen years at work in building it up.  The result of its labors was a total population, including troops, government officials, and clergy, of 380 souls, of whom 170 were in the King's pay.  Only a few of the colonists were within the limits of the present Louisiana.  The rest lived in or around the feeble stockade forts at Mobile, Biloxi, Ship Island, and Dauphin Island.  This last station had been partially abandoned; but some of the colonists proposed to return to it, in order to live by fishing, and only waited, we are told, for help from the King.  This incessant dependence on government relaxed the fibres of the colony and sapped its life-blood. 

The King was now exchanged for Crozat and his grinding monopoly.  The colonists had carried on a modest trade with the Spaniards at Pensacola in skins, fowls, Indian corn, and a few other articles, bringing back a little money in return.  This, their only source of profit, was now cut off; they could sell nothing, even to one another.  They were forbidden to hold meetings without permission; but some of them secretly drew up a petition to La Mothe-Cadillac, who was still the official chief of the colony, begging that the agents of Crozat should be restricted to wholesale dealings, and that the inhabitants might be allowed to trade at retail.  Cadillac denounced the petition as seditious, threatened to hang the bearer of it, and deigned no other answer. 

He resumed his sarcasms against the colony.  "In my opinion this country is not worth a straw (ne vaut pas un fétu).  The inhabitants are eager to be taken out of it.  The soldiers are always grumbling, and with reason. " As to the council, which was to be the only court of justice, he says that no such thing is possible, because there are no proper persons to compose it; and though Duclos, the new intendant, has proposed two candidates, the first of these, the Sieur de Lafresnière, learned to sign his name only four months ago, and the other, being chief surgeon of the colony, is too busy to serve. 

Between Bienville, the late governor, and La Mothe-Cadillac, who had supplanted him, there was a standing quarrel; and the colony was split into hostile factions, led by the two disputants.  The minister at Versailles was beset by their mutual accusations, and Bienville wrote that his refusal to marry Cadillac's daughter was the cause of the spite the governor bore him. 

The indefatigable curé De la Vente sent to Ponchartrain a memorial, in the preamble of which he says that since Monsieur le Ministre wishes to be informed exactly of the state of things in Louisiana, he, La Vente, has the honor, with malice to nobody, to make known the pure truth; after which he goes on to say that the inhabitants "are nearly all drunkards, gamblers, blasphemers, and enemies of everything good;" and he proceeds to illustrate the statement with many particulars. 

As the inhabitants were expected to work for Crozat, and not for themselves, it naturally followed that they would not work at all; and idleness produced the usual results. 

The yearly shipment of girls continued; but there was difficulty in finding husbands for them.  The reason was not far to seek.  Duclos, the intendant, reports the arrival of an invoice of twelve of them, "so ugly that the inhabitants are in no hurry to take them. " The Canadians, who formed the most vigorous and valuable part of the population, much preferred Indian squaws.  "It seems to me," pursues the intendant, "that in the choice of girls, good looks should be more considered than virtue. " This latter requisite seems, at the time, to have found no more attention than the other, since the candidates for matrimony were drawn from the Parisian hospitals and houses of correction, from the former of which Crozat was authorized to take one hundred girls a year, "in order to increase the population. " These hospitals were compulsory asylums for the poor and vagrant of both sexes, of whom the great Hôpital Général of Paris contained at one time more than six thousand. 

Crozat had built his chief hopes of profit on a trade, contraband or otherwise, with the Mexican ports; but the Spanish officials, faithful instruments of the exclusive policy of their government, would not permit it, and were so vigilant that he could not elude them.  At the same time, to his vexation, he found that the King's officers in Louisiana, with more address or better luck, and in contempt of his monopoly, which it was their business to protect, carried on, for their own profit, a small smuggling trade with Vera Cruz.  He complained that they were always thwarting his agents and conspiring against his interests.  At last, finding no resource left but an unprofitable trade with the Indians, he gave up his charter, which had been a bane to the colony and a loss to himself.  Louisiana returned to the Crown, and was soon passed over to the new Mississippi Company, called also the Western Company. 

That charlatan of genius, the Scotchman John Law, had undertaken, with the eager support of the Regent Duke of Orleans, to deliver France from financial ruin through a prodigious system of credit, of which Louisiana, with its imaginary gold mines, was made the basis.  The government used every means to keep up the stock of the Mississippi Company.  It was ordered that the notes of the royal bank and all certificates of public debt should be accepted at par in payment for its shares.  Powers and privileges were lavished on it.  It was given the monopoly of the French slave-trade, the monopoly of tobacco, the profits of the royal mint, and the farming of the revenues of the kingdom.  Ingots of gold, pretending to have come from the new Eldorado of Louisiana, were displayed in the shop-windows of Paris.  The fever of speculation rose to madness, and the shares of the company were inflated to monstrous and insane proportions. 

When Crozat resigned his charter, Louisiana, by the highest estimates, contained about seven hundred souls, including soldiers, but not blacks or Indians.  Crozat's successors, however, say that the whole number of whites, men, women, and children, was not above four hundred.  When the Mississippi Company took the colony in charge, it was but a change of despots.  Louisiana was a prison.  But while no inhabitant could leave it without permission of the authorities, all Jews were expelled, and all Protestants excluded.  The colonists could buy nothing except from the agents of the company, and sell nothing except to the same all-powerful masters, always at prices fixed by them.  Foreign vessels were forbidden to enter any port of Louisiana, on pain of confiscation. 

The coin in circulation was nearly all Spanish, and in less than two years the Company, by a series of decrees, made changes of about eighty per cent in its value.  Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, of trade, and of action, were alike denied.  Hence voluntary immigration was not to be expected; "but," says the Duc de Saint-Simon, "the government wished to establish effective settlements in these vast countries, after the example of the English; and therefore, in order to people them, vagabonds and beggars, male and female, including many women of the town, were seized for the purpose both in Paris and throughout France. " Saint-Simon approves these proceedings in themselves, as tending at once to purge France and people Louisiana, but thinks the business was managed in a way to cause needless exasperation among the lower classes. 

In 1720 it was ordered by royal edict that no more vagabonds or criminals should be sent to Louisiana.  The edict, it seems, touched only one sex, for in the next year eighty girls were sent to the colony from the Parisian House of Correction called the Salpêtrière.  There had been a more or less constant demand for wives, as appears by letters still preserved in the archives of Paris, the following extract from one of which is remarkable for the freedom with which the writer, a M.  de Chassin, takes it upon him to address a minister of State in a court where punctilio reigned supreme.  "You see, Monseigneur, that nothing is wanting now to make a solid settlement in Louisiana but a certain piece of furniture which one often repents having got, and with which I shall dispense, like the rest, till the Company sends us girls who have at least some show of virtue.  If there happens to be any young woman of your acquaintance who wants to make the voyage for love of me, I should be much obliged to her, and would do my best to show her my gratitude. "

The Company, which was invested with sovereign powers, began its work by sending to Louisiana three companies of soldiers and sixty-nine colonists.  Its wisest act was the removal of the governor, L'Épinay, who had supplanted La Mothe-Cadillac, and the reappointment of Bienville in his place.  Bienville immediately sought out a spot for establishing a permanent station on the Mississippi.  Fifty men were sent to clear the ground, and in spite of an inundation which overflowed it for a time, the feeble foundations of New Orleans were laid.  Louisiana, hitherto diffused through various petty cantonments, far and near, had at last a capital, or the germ of one. 

It was the sixth of September, 1717, when the charter of the Mississippi Company was entered in the registers of the Parliament of Paris; and from that time forward, before the offices of the Company in the Rue Quincampoix, crowds of crazed speculators jostled and fought from morning till night to get their names inscribed among the stockholders.  Within five years after, the huge glittering bubble had burst.  The shares, each one of which had seemed a fortune, found no more purchasers, and in its fall the Company dragged down with it its ally and chief creditor, the bank.  All was dismay and despair, except in those who had sold out in time, and turned delusive paper into solid values.  John Law, lately the idol and reputed savior of France, fled for his life, amid a howl of execration. 

Yet the interests of the kingdom required that Louisiana should be sustained.  The illusions that had given to the Mississippi Company a morbid and intoxicated vitality were gone, but the Company lingered on, and the government still lent it a helping hand.  A French writer remarks that the few Frenchmen who were famishing on the shores of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico had cost the King, since the colony began, more than 150,000 livres a year.  The directors of the Company reported that they had shipped 7,020 persons to the colony, besides four hundred already there when they took possession, and that 5,420 still remained, the rest having died or escaped.  Besides this importation of whites, they had also brought six hundred slaves from Guinea.  It is reckoned that the King, Crozat, and the Mississippi Company had spent among them about eight million livres on Louisiana, without any return. 

The bursting of the Mississippi bubble did not change the principles of administration in Louisiana.  The settlers, always looking to France to supply their needs and protect them against their own improvidence, were in the habit of butchering for food the livestock sent them for propagation.  The remedy came in the shape of a royal edict forbidding any colonist to kill, without permission of the authorities, any cow, sheep, or lamb belonging to himself, on pain of a fine of three hundred livres; or to kill any horse, cow, or bull belonging to another, on pain of death. 

Authority and order were the watchwords, and disorder was the rule.  The agents of power quarrelled among themselves, except when they leagued together to deceive their transatlantic masters and cover their own misdeeds.  Each maligned the other, and it was scarcely possible for the King or the Company to learn the true state of affairs in their distant colony. 

Accusations were renewed against Bienville, till in 1724 he was ordered to France to give account of his conduct, and the Sieur Perier was sent out to take his place.  Perier had no easy task.  The Natchez Indians, among whom the French had made a settlement and built a fort called Fort Rosalie, suddenly rose on their white neighbors and massacred nearly all of them.  Then followed a long course of Indian wars.  The French believed that there was a general conspiracy among the southern tribes for their destruction,—though this was evidently an exaggeration of the danger, which, however, was serious.  The Chickasaws, a brave and warlike people, living chiefly in what is now western Tennessee and Kentucky, made common cause with the Natchez, while the more numerous Choctaws, most of whose villages were in the present State of Mississippi, took part with the French.  More than a thousand soldiers had been sent to Louisiana; but Perier pronounced them "so bad that they seem to have been made on purpose for the colony. " There were also about eight hundred militia.  Perier showed little vigor, and had little success.  His chief resource was to set the tribes against one another.  He reports that his Indian allies had brought him a number of Natchez prisoners, and that he had caused six of them, four men and two women, to be burned alive, and had sent the rest as slaves to Saint  Domingo.  The Chickasaws, aided by English traders from the Carolinas, proved formidable adversaries, and when attacked, ensconced themselves in stockade forts so strong that, as the governor complains, there was no dislodging the defenders without cannon and heavy mortars. 

In this state of things the directors of the Mississippi Company, whose affairs had gone from bad to worse, declared that they could no longer bear the burden of Louisiana, and begged the King to take it off their hands.  The colony was therefore transferred from the mercantile despotism of the Company to the paternal despotism of the Crown, and it profited by the change.  Commercial monopoly was abolished.  Trade between France and Louisiana was not only permitted, but encouraged by bounties and exemption from duties; and instead of paying to the Company two hundred per cent of profit on indispensable supplies, the colonists now got them at a reasonable price. 

Perier was removed, and again Bienville was made governor.  Diron d'Artaguette, who came with him as intendant, reported that the colonists were flying the country to escape starvation, and Bienville adds that during the past year they had subsisted for three months on the seed of reeds and wild grasses.  The white population had rather diminished than increased during the last twelve years, while the blacks, who had lately conspired to massacre all the French along the Mississippi, had multiplied to two thousand.  A French writer says: "There must have been a worm gnawing the root of the tree that had been transplanted into so rich a soil, to make it wither instead of growing.  What it needed was the air of liberty. " But the air of liberty is malaria to those who have not learned to breathe it.  The English colonists throve in it because they and their forefathers had been trained in a school of self-control and self-dependence; and what would have been intoxication for others, was vital force to them. 

Bienville found the colony again threatened with a general rising, or, as he calls it, a revolt, of the Indian tribes.  The Carolina traders, having no advantage of water-ways, had journeyed by land with pack-horses through a thousand miles of wilderness, and with the aid of gifts had instigated the tribes to attack the French.  The Chickasaws especially, friends of the English and arch-enemies of Louisiana, became so threatening that a crushing blow against them was thought indispensable.  The forces of the colony were mustered to attempt it; the enterprise was mismanaged, and failed completely.  Bienville tried to explain the disaster, but his explanation was ill received at court; he was severely rebuked, reproved at the same time for permitting two families to emigrate to Saint  Domingo, and sharply ordered to suffer nobody to leave Louisiana without express license from Versailles.  Deeply wounded, he offered his resignation, and it was accepted.  Whatever his failings, he had faithfully served the colony, and gained from posterity the title of Father of Louisiana. 

With the help of industrious nursing,—or, one might almost say, in spite of it,—Louisiana began at last to strike roots into the soil and show signs of growth, though feebly as compared with its sturdy rivals along the Atlantic seaboard, which had cost their King nothing, and had been treated, for the most part, with the coolest neglect.  Cavelier de la Salle's dream of planting a firm settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi, and utilizing, by means of it, the resources of the vast interior, was, after half a century, in some measure realized.  New France (using that name in its broadest geographical sense) had now two heads,—Canada and Louisiana; one looking upon the Gulf of Saint  Lawrence, and the other upon the Gulf of Mexico.  Canada was not without jealousy of her younger and weaker sister, lest she might draw away, as she had begun to do at the first, some of the most active and adventurous elements of the Canadian population; lest she might prove a competitor in the fur-trade; and lest she should encroach on the Illinois and other western domains, which the elder and stronger sister claimed as her own.  These fears were not unfounded; yet the vital interests of the two French colonies were the same, and each needed the help of the other in the prime and all-essential task of keeping the British colonies in check.  The chiefs of Louisiana looked forward to a time when the great southern tribes,—Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and even the dreaded Chickasaws,—won over by French missionaries to the Church, and therefore to France, should be turned against the encroaching English to stop their westward progress and force them back to the borders of the Atlantic.  Meanwhile the chiefs of Canada were maturing the plan—pursued with varying assiduity, but always kept in view—of connecting the two vital extremities of New France by a chain of forts to control the passes of the West, keep communications open, and set English invasion at defiance.