Parkman Vol. 6-1, Chapter 13

An event took place that was to have a great influence on the future of French America.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 1. Beginning Chapter 13.

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.

[Henri de Tonty à Cabart de Villermont, 11 Septembre, 1694 (Margry, iv. 3).]

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.[1] 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.

[1: Mémoire sur le Projet d’establir une nouvelle Colonie au Mississippi, 1697 (Margry, iv. 21).]

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, not brilliant, but healthy, orderly, well rooted in the soil, and of hardy and vigorous growth.

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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4]

[2: Iberville au Ministre, 18 Juin, 1698 (Margry, iv. 51).]

[3: Mémoire pour servir d’Instruction au Sieur d’Iberville (Margry, iv. 72).]

[4: Journal d’Iberville (Margry, iv. 131).]

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, sometime 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.[5] After pushing up the stream till the twenty-fourth, he returned to the ships by way of lakes Maurepas and Ponchartrain.

[5: This letter, which D’Iberville gives in his Journal, is dated “Du Village des Quinipissas, le 20 Avril, 1685.” Iberville identifies the Quinipissas with the Bayagoulas. The date of the letter was evidently misread, as Tonty’s journey was in 1686. See “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West,” 455, note. Iberville’s lieutenant, Sugères, commanding the “Marin,” gives the date correctly. Journal de la Frégate le Marin, 1698, 1699 (Margry, iv.).]

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.[6] 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.”[7] 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.[8] 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.

[6: Journal du Voyage du Chevalier d’Iberville sur le Vaisseau du Roy la Renommée en 1699 (Margry, iv. 395).]

[7: Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane (1846), i. 69. Bénard de la Harpe, Journal historique (1831), 20. Coxe says, in the preface to his Description of Carolana (1722), that “the present proprietor of Carolana, my honour’d Father, … was the author of this English voyage to the Mississippi, having in the year 1698 equipp’d and fitted out Two Ships for Discovery by Sea, and also for building a Fortification and settling a Colony by land; there being in both vessels, besides Sailors and Common Men, above Thirty English and French Volunteers.” Coxe adds that the expedition would have succeeded if one of the commanders had not failed to do his duty.]

[8: Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane (1846), i. 69.]

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.”

[Mémoire pour servir d’Instruction au Sieur d’Iberville (Margry, iv. 348).]

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.

[Journal du Voyage du Chevalier d’Iberville sur le Vaisseau du Roy la Renommée, 1699, 1700.]

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.[9] 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.[10]

[9: Mémoire de la Junte de Guerre des Indes. Le Ministre de la Marine au Duc d’Harcourt (Margry, iv. 553, 568).]

[10: Iberville wrote in 1701 a long memorial, in which he tried to convince the Spanish court that it was for the interest of Spain that the French should form a barrier between her colonies and those of England, which, he says, were about to seize the country as far as the Mississippi and beyond it.]

From A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 1, Chapter 13 by Francis Parkman

Volume 6 of Parkman’s History of France in North America titled “A Half-Century of Conflict” was itself published in two volumes. This means that “Volume 6” (consistent with how past books published on this website were called) must be called “Part 6”, instead – to avoid confusion. This book is Volume 1 of “A Half-Century of Conflict”. The next book in the series will be called “Part 6, A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 2”.

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Preface to this book.

This book, forming Part VI. of the series called France and England in North America, fills the gap between Part V., “Count Frontenac,” and Part VII., “Montcalm and Wolfe;” so that the series now forms a continuous history of the efforts of France to occupy and control this continent.

In the present volumes the nature of the subject does not permit an unbroken thread of narrative, and the unity of the book lies in its being throughout, in one form or another, an illustration of the singularly contrasted characters and methods of the rival claimants to North America.

Like the rest of the series, this work is founded on original documents. The statements of secondary writers have been accepted only when found to conform to the evidence of contemporaries, whose writings have been sifted and collated with the greatest care. As extremists on each side have charged me with favoring the other, I hope I have been unfair to neither.

The manuscript material collected for the preparation of the series now complete forms about seventy volumes, most of them folios. These have been given by me from time to time to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in whose library they now are, open to the examination of those interested in the subjects of which they treat. The collection was begun forty-five years ago, and its formation has been exceedingly slow, having been retarded by difficulties which seemed insurmountable, and for years were so in fact. Hence the completion of the series has required twice the time that would have sufficed under less unfavorable conditions.

BOSTON, March 26, 1892

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