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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 con-
victs 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 per sons, sent to construct a city, had but encamped among unsubdued canebrakes.
And yet the enlight-
ened 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.
