Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans Read online

  The Mississippi has run its present course since the sixteenth century. It was on the verge of jumping again when explorers appeared on the scene. If such a jump were to occur now below New Orleans, it would require a whole new system of navigation from the Gulf to the City. But if it were to occur above New Orleans, the result would be disastrous. The largest port in the United States would no longer be situated on a river but a stagnant stream.

  New Orleanians can recite a litany of difficulties with which they live involving the river:

  1) Most of the city is below sea level, while the river flows ten to fifteen feet above sea level.

  2) The present Mid-City area, lying as it does in a bowl, used to flood constantly and was a breeding ground for yellow fever and malaria. The swamp teemed with snakes and alligators, and, when dry, was the consistency of glue.

  3) The bedrock beneath the city, which is only compacted clay, is seventy feet below the surface in some places.

  4) The only avenues into the city when the white man came were the natural levees. During flood times, if crevasses occurred, the levees would be cut and transportation disrupted.

  5) Hurricanes struck frequently from the Gulf and still do, driving the tides ahead of them, often in the direction of the city.

  In view of all of this, one wonders why almost a million people live and work in New Orleans. But more than that, one wonders why Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, chose such a site for his city. To Bienville, it was simple: it was the logical and necessary spot for a city.

  It was clear to Bienville that the river demanded that a city exist at its mouth, but in all of the two hundred miles south of the site of Baton Rouge, it provided no place to put one. Naturally, the settlers wanted high ground, and the site of Baton Rouge met that requirement, but it was too far upriver to be convenient to ocean-bound ships.

  Map dated 1849. Shows areas of New Orleans flooded after the Sauvé Crevasse, May 3, 1849. Darkest areas were worst. Mid-City was nine feet under water. Bayou St. John connects the Carondelet Canal (Old Basin Canal) to Vieux Carré (First Municipality). The New Basin Canal connects lake to Second Municipality and the City of Carrollton, a suburb.

  Mississippi River and ancient deltas. In the mid-twentieth century, the river threatened to jump its course, either into Lake Ponchartrain at Bonnet Carré or into the Atchafalaya at Morganza. Either would have been disastrous to New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers built spillways at both locations to prevent flooding and keep the river on present course.

  The site of the old Indian portage from the Mississippi River to Bayou St. John could be reached not only by coming up the river from the Gulf but also by traveling westward from the Gulf Coast through the Mississippi Sound through Lake Borgne and into Lake Pontchartrain. This was the place where Bienville decreed that the city of New Orleans would be built.

  From bottom right to upper left: Water from Gulf of Mexico approaches the Port of New Orleans and the Intracoastal Waterway. (Courtesy Port of New Orleans)

  The Mississippi River Basin is shaped like a funnel, and the city that was to be founded on Bienville’s “Beautiful Crescent” of land in the bend of the river would control the tip of that funnel. It would be the gatekeeper to the richest river valley on earth. This was the destiny of New Orleans. Had there been nothing more than a sandbar in that bend of the river, Bienville would have urged his settlers to camp on it, fighting the elements until their own ingenuity provided the answers to their problems. This, of course, is what eventually happened, for the settlers did not leave. They endured with proprietary pride, and slowly, against the indomitable odds, the city grew and prospered.

  Almost every river in the world provides a site for a city near its mouth where there is high ground on which to build and where the river is narrow enough for land traffic to cross it conveniently. But not the Mississippi. At the mouth of almost every river there is an embayment, where the sea has entered the mouth of the river and flooded it, forming a bay at the point where the river narrows. But the Mississippi does not narrow at any point. At the foot of Canal Street, it is nearly a half of a mile wide. It runs uniformly wide for hundreds of miles. It does not provide any site for a city south of Baton Rouge. It does not form a bay, and it wildly jumps its riverbanks every five or six hundred years, aloof and indifferent to the needs of man.

  The river last jumped its riverbed in the sixteenth century to follow a diversion near New Orleans instead of near the city of Donaldsonville, to which it had diverted in the twelfth century. So, in 1541, the scene was set for the discovery of the river in its present location, and into this chapter of history sailed Hernando De Soto, a Spanish explorer, the first European to locate and describe the Mississippi River Valley.

  CHAPTER II

  Discovery and Exploration

  The Indians spoke of a great river flowing through the continent and cutting it in two, and the white men jumped to the conclusion that it flowed east to west and could provide a western passage to China.

  Hernando De Soto

  Hernando De Soto is credited with having established the fact that there was such a river. De Soto was a young man who had fought with the Spanish army during the conquest of Peru and had made his fortune there. As a result of that service, he was appointed Governor of Cuba in 1538. Goaded by a desire to find still more gold, he set out in 1539 with six hundred soldiers to explore Florida, which had been described to him as a land of gold.

  De Soto’s discovery of the Mississippi River, May 1541. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  Map of Mississippi River exploration. (Map by Joan B. Garvey)

  After landing in Tampa Bay in May 1539, he and his men moved north, while a party he had sent west discovered Pensacola Bay. After crossing mountains and fighting off Indians for two years, he sighted the Mississippi River in May 1541. The exact site of his discovery is in dispute. Some historians place it in Memphis, others in northern Mississippi. He described it as “wide and muddy and full of logs” (New Orleans Regional Planning Commission 1969, 5). He crossed the river into Arkansas but returned to Mississippi and, in 1542, died of fever. His men weighted down his body and buried it in the river.

  Marquette and Joliet

  More than a century after De Soto’s death, the next chapter in the history of New Orleans unfolded. For 133 years, the lower Mississippi lay neglected by explorers. In 1673, a French Canadian fur trader, Louis Joliet, and a Jesuit missionary priest, Father Jacques Marquette, came down the Mississippi River toward the Gulf of Mexico.

  In that year, Governor Louis Frontenac of Canada had ordered Marquette and Joliet to take an expedition party in search of a route to the Pacific Ocean. With five other Frenchmen and some guides, they left Lake Michigan paddling canoes up the Fox River to the site of the present city of Portage, Wisconsin. They carried their canoes across the land to the Wisconsin River, which empties into the Mississippi. Going south on the Mississippi, they stopped for a peaceful meeting with the Illinois Indians, who gave them a calumet, a peace pipe. From there, they continued south as far as the Arkansas River, where they were surrounded by Indians with guns. It was the calumet that saved their lives.

  Some of the Indians became friendly enough to tell them about some other white men, ten days farther south, who had given them the guns. Knowing this had to be a party of Spaniards, Marquette and Joliet decided that it would be dangerous to journey any farther. They ended their trip down the Mississippi and returned to Canada by way of the Illinois River, passing by the site of the present city of Chicago.

  René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle

  The real story of Louisiana begins with its third episode: the expedition of Réne-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle down the Mississippi River in the year 1682. La Salle had been born of a wealthy family in Rouen, France. He had come to Canada in 1666, at the age of thirty-two, to become a fur trader. To this end, he bought a piece of land eight miles from Montreal and established a trading post. He d
id much trading with the Indians, who taught him their language and customs and told him stories about a great river called the Ohio, which flowed south to the sea. La Salle believed this to be the much sought-after route to the Pacific Ocean. So, in 1669, he sold his land and set out to explore the Ohio.

  Four years later, in 1674, La Salle was called to the French court to receive honors on the recommendations of the governor of Canada. He used this opportunity to ask permission of Louis XIV to explore the rich Illinois country and to whatever it would lead him. This was a privilege that required royal sanction at the time. Permission was willingly granted, since the king believed that colonies in the New World would add measurably to the prestige of France as a world power. His treasury, however, was depleted from war with England. La Salle had to pay to have his own ship built.

  La Salle claims Louisiana for France, 1682. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  In 1692, La Salle led an expedition of fifty-six people down the Mississippi River from the Illinois River (which he left on February 6, 1682) to the Gulf of Mexico (which he reached on April 9, 1682). On this date, he disembarked and erected a cross on the shore and a column inscribed with the name and coat of arms of the king. Then, he claimed all the land drained by the Mississippi for France and named the region Louisiana, in honor of King Louis XIV.

  He then returned to France for supplies and settlers for a colony at the mouth of the river. In his company was an Italian adventurer named Henri de Tonti (or Tonty), who shared his dream of an empire stretching from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Tonti had long been his trusted companion and was to be the principal historian on the expedition. It is not difficult to imagine their excitement as they considered the possibility of developing a region larger than the country of France and then controlling trade on the only highway through this vast continent, since travel at the time was done almost entirely by water. The court of France, still in financial difficulty, agreed that the value of such a possession was inestimable.

  La Salle left France on July 4, 1684, on his way to the Gulf of Mexico with 4 ships, a force of marines, 100 soldiers, and 250 settlers including women and children, all ready to be the first to live in Louisiana. Stopping in Santo Domingo to rest and refit their ships, they moved on in November 1684 for the Gulf of Mexico.

  Why La Salle didn’t return to the Mississippi River by his original route is not recorded. Perhaps he though the southern route shorter. Perhaps he simply wanted to explore it. Undoubtedly, he was so heady with his earlier success that he expected no problems in finding the river from the south. How could anyone miss a river of such size? Now, anyone who has been out in the Gulf seeking an entry back into the Mississippi knows that the several mouths of the river look little different from the low grassy sandbars surrounding them and that they all look exactly like the bayous, which lead inland from the Gulf and then fade away. Few maps charted these estuaries, for European explorers and settlers had not yet sailed that way, so the probability of errors was great.

  In addition, La Salle had never viewed the river from the south, so he had no points of reference. He became confused, lost his bearings, and made a few trial runs into the coast. Finally, the ships landed in Matagorda Bay on the Texas coast in February 1685.

  The bay was situated at the mouth of a large river emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. La Salle knew by the curve of the coastline that he had missed the mouth of the Mississippi River. Beaujeu, his ship’s captain, with whom he had argued constantly, then left to return to France, leaving La Salle the brig La Belle. In this ship, La Salle hoped to continue his search.

  La Salle built Fort St. Louis at Matagorda Bay, completing it in 1685. Then, his brig was wrecked in a storm, and he became determined to return to Canada by land to get help for his colony. Although he had left Europe with four ships, he now had none. One had been captured by the Spanish in the Gulf of Mexico. Another had been lost when entering Matagorda Bay. Beaujeu had left with the third; and the last, La Belle, had been wrecked in a storm.

  Some of the settlers agreed to stay in the fort, but with La Salle on this incredible journey were his brother, his nephew, and a few companions, including a man named Joutel, who survived to relate the story. In 1687, the heroic La Salle was murdered by his own men and buried in alien soil. We can only surmise that the assassins were exhausted and despondent after their unsuccessful adventure. The many months had taken their toll. Both ships and lives had been lost. The men were unsure of their position, without supplies, and fearful for their lives. It is understandable that on a long, difficult journey, violence would erupt. The survivors of the march continued on to Canada, where they told the sad story of “La Salle’s Folly.” The colony that had been established in Texas was later destroyed by the Indians.

  But another part of the story has not yet been told. Tonti, La Salle’s friend, had come down the Mississippi River from the Illinois country, planning to meet La Salle coming northward from the Gulf of Mexico at the camp of the Bayogoulas (between New Orleans and Baton Rouge). Tonti waited as long as possible for La Salle and his party, but when he could not wait any longer, left a letter with an Indian chieftain that would not be delivered until 1699, and not to La Salle, but to Bienville and Iberville, the next French explorers in our story.

  CHAPTER III

  The French Period

  La Salle was gone, but France’s desire for an empire was still strong. For ten years, France had been in no position to attempt further colonization. She had been at war with England until 1697 and now looked to the New World for an empire. A favorable time had come for colonization plans to be presented at the court of France, and Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, a young French Canadian, had his plans ready at the right time.

  One of the first views of the Place d’Armes was this watercolor from 1726 by Jean Pierre Lassus. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  Iberville’s father, Charles Le Moyne, was a successful fur trader with a wealth of eleven sons. Two of his sons, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, and Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, could foresee that the fur-trading business would not provide for them all. They had made other plans for their future. Iberville, the older of the two, had just distinguished himself in the war against England. He presented his plans to found a colony near the mouth of the Mississippi River to the king, who received them favorably. Iberville, however, needed more than just permission. He was not a wealthy man. Seeking a sponsor in this enterprise, he was fortunate in finding Louis de Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain and Secretary of State, to fund his venture.

  Iberville left France in October 1698 with two large frigates and two freight ships, a company of marines, and two hundred settlers, including women and children, for his colony. In his company were his brother Bienville and Father Anatase Douay, a survivor of La Salle’s expedition.

  Iberville had been commissioned to build forts at the mouth of the river to protect the settlement against British encroachments. In Santo Domingo, he was joined by the Marquis de Chateaumorant, in command of a war vessel, who presumably was to protect him in this venture. He sailed to Apalachicola Bay, Florida, and then followed the coast in search of the river. On January 29, 1699, he reached Pensacola, Florida, but the Spanish governor did not allow the Frenchmen to enter the harbor. They set sail again, and in February arrived at Mobile Bay, where the Indians told Iberville that the Mississippi was only a short distance to the west. Moving on, Iberville anchored before the Chandeleur Islands. He landed on Ship Island, which his men so named because it had a good harbor. He built some huts there and then went on with his brother to explore the coast of what are now Biloxi and Ocean Springs. From there, he and his men set out in small boats to look for the river.

  Iberville found many other islands. One they called Massacre Island, because there were so many bones there (later called Dauphin Island). Another was christened Horn Island because a powder horn was left there. They also found Cat Island, so called because of
the many raccoons, which they mistook for cats; and Deer Island, because deer were plentiful there.

  On March 2, 1699, Iberville arrived at the mouth of the river, where there was fresh water and a strong current. The following day, Shrove Tuesday, they began their travels up the river. Finding a bayou twelve miles upstream, they named it in honor of the holiday, Mardi Gras Bayou, and thus was Mardi Gras introduced to the Louisiana territory.

  Father Anatase Douay said Mass the following Sunday for Iberville’s company at the village of the Bayogoula Indians, who informed them that a letter had been left by Tonti to La Salle in 1686. The letter was found in the possession of the Mongoulacha Indians. In addition to the letter, there was a prayer book, a list of names of La Salle’s companions, and a coat of arms from La Salle’s expedition. At last, Iberville knew he was on “La Salle’s River.”

  At the bluff above the river, which Iberville considered a good spot for a settlement, he saw a red stick, the maypole used by the Indians for hanging up offerings of fish and game. Iberville called the place Baton Rouge.

  The Indians asked him if he would like to return to Ship Island by a different route. Enthusiastically, and with commendable courage, he agreed. The Indians knew that Iberville had come on a serious mission to establish settlements for white colonists. This could only work to their detriment. Iberville had no way of knowing that they would not murder him and drop his body in the river. But curiosity is the essence of men like Iberville, and eagerly, he went with them.