Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (5 page)

The Natchez were a brilliant tribe of Indians. They worshipped the sun and kept a fire burning perpetually in their temple. The story of Noah’s ark was part of their culture. In 1716, they rose against the French, and Bienville was sent to fight them. With only a few men in his detachment, he put two of them to death and made terms with the others. In the same year, Bienville built Fort Rosalie on the site that had been selected by his brother years before.

In 1717, just five years after Crozat was granted his charter, he gave it up. Trade with the Spanish in Mexico had not materialized and trade with the Indians was not profitable. He declared that he had spent four times his original investment and had seen no profit.

Louisiana, then a colony of seven hundred people, was transferred to the Company of the West (called the Company of the Indies after 1719), which was to have authority in the colony for twenty-four years, to enjoy a monopoly of trade, to name the governor and other officers, and would in turn be obliged to send to Louisiana six thousand white colonists and three thousand blacks within ten years. The president of the Company was the famous John Law, private advisor to Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans.

John Law, Impresario of High Pressure

John Law
was a Scotsman, a professional gambler, and a financial genius. He had escaped Great Britain fifteen years earlier after killing a man in a duel and had spent the intervening years traveling all over Europe, trying to develop his great plan.

Law was a well known manipulator. It is therefore easy to understand that he sought and secured good will and confidence of Philippe of Orléans, regent of France after the death of Louis XIV. Like Law, Philippe was a gambler and a womanizer, and the friendship of the two rogues was inevitable. In time, Law became the advisor to the regent, and with his aid and encouragement, started his campaign to populate the Louisiana colony in record time and to make himself a fortune in the bargain.

His fraudulent scheme called for the combining of the Bank of France and the Company of the West, an arrangement that he successfully managed. The Mississippi Bubble, a name later given his plan, still incites the envy of high-pressure salesmen everywhere. The plan was 1) to induce noblemen and rich middle class businessmen to buy shares of stock in Louisiana land and also to purchase land for them and 2) to entice (or to force) the poor of Europe to become
engagés,
hired field hands for the Company or for the concessionaires. Shareholders would prosper, Law promised, when the gold, silver, diamonds, and pearls were found in the New World. With nothing but gaudy promises to back his “shares,” Law found himself inundated by the demands of speculators. He could not print the shares fast enough.

In 1716, Law had signed a contract with the government of France, (with the blessing of Philippe), allowing him to establish a private bank, which would provide him with all the credit he needed. Then, in 1717, he replaced the governor at the age of thirty-seven.

A brilliant, ruthless sales campaign followed, unprecedented in Europe. Posters and handbills flooded France, Germany, and Switzerland, offering free land, provisions, and transportation to those who would volunteer to immigrate to the New World. They were told that the soil of Louisiana bore two crops a year without cultivation and that the Indians so adored the white man that they would not let him labor, but took the burden from him. In addition, they were promised the imaginary gold mines, the pearl fisheries, as well as a delightful climate where there was no disease or old age.

Many paupers who strayed into Paris or prisoners who would not volunteer were kidnapped and shipped under guard to fill the emptiness of Louisiana. Prostitutes and the inmates of jails and hospitals were all sent to populate the colony and to start the flow of wealth to the stockholders.

Alexander Franz, in his
Die Kolonisation des Mississippitales Bis Zum Ausgange Der Französischen Herrschaft: Eine Kolonialhistorische Studie
” (1906), wrote:

The company even kept a whole regiment of archers which cleaned Paris of its rabble and adventurers, and received for this a fixed salary and 100 livres a head . . . Five thousand people are said to have disappeared from Paris in April, 1721, alone.

Prisoners were set free in Paris in September, 1721 . . . under the condition that they would marry the prostitutes and go with them to Louisiana. The newly married couples were chained together and thus dragged to the port of embarkation.

Meanwhile, Bienville set his men to work clearing forests and erecting sheds and barracks at the site of the Indian portage, which he
had selected back in 1699 on his first visit to Louisiana with Iberville. The portage was roughly where Esplanade Avenue is today. It is a trail from the river to Bayou St. John
(Bienville had named the bayou in honor of his patron saint). The trail led through cypress swamps teeming with snakes and alligators near a fortified Indian village called Tchoutchouma
. It was at this point, where the river comes closest to the lake, that Bienville had decided to build his city. This “beautiful crescent in the river” would be the site of his new trading post.

He wanted the spot for two reasons. First, it was the half-way point by water between Natchez (Fort Rosalie) and Mobile (Fort Louis de la Mobile). Secondly, it was a spot “safe from Hurricanes and Tidal Waves,” according to an easy account of the city.

Bienville had to argue for the site with Pierre Le Blond de La Tour, the royal engineer; with Adrian de Pauger
, assistant engineer; and with John Law
, president of the Company. They all thought it was absurd to select a site in the middle of a swamp, but Bienville persevered, and the “beautiful crescent” became the city of La Nouvelle Orléans.

In June, 1718, Bienville wrote in his diary:

We are working at Nouvelle Orleans with as much zeal as the shortage of men will permit. I myself conveyed over the spot to select the place where it will be the best to locate the settlement . . . I am grieved to see so few people engaged in a task which requires at least a hundred times the number. All the ground of the site, except the borders, which are drowned by floods, are very good and everything will grow there. (Kendall 1922, 5).

John Law ordered a garrison, a director’s building and lodging, for the director’s staff to be built to establish the beginnings of trade.

Some inhabitants of the city in 1718 were Bienville, his Intendant (the head of civil affairs), surveyors (the Lassus brothers from Mobile), carpenters, troops, and a few concessionaires. There was de La Tour, the Royal engineer; Pauger, second engineer; Ignace Broutin, who built the Ursuline Convent; doctors; priests; and soldiers. French soldiers usually had a secondary trade. Some were wigmakers, rope makers, weavers, gardeners, shoemakers, laborers, brewers, locksmiths, bakers, papermakers, and cabinet makers.

Costumes of French soldiery in the early eighteenth century.
(Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

In June 1718, the first wave of European immigrants began to arrive in response to John Law’s campaign at the same time that Bienville was supervising the work in New Orleans. Three hundred came in three ships, accompanied by five hundred soldiers and convicts to make a total of eight hundred coming into a colony where only seven hundred lived, thus doubling, in one day, the population of Louisiana (Delier 1909, 18).

They were held, for lack of a better place, on Dauphin Island. They were crowded, unsheltered, hungry, and wretched. Many starved and died, but there was no place else to go until Governor Bienville could come for them with his few boats and his few men to distribute them around the countryside. Some he sent to Natchez, some to the valley of the Yazoo River, and some to New Orleans, where they were crowded into tents and rough sheds.

John Law’s career ended with his flight from Paris as a bankrupt and a fugitive on December 10, 1720. He fled to the Belgian frontier in a coach lent to him by Madame Brié with escorts provided to him by the Duc d’Orléans.

The German Law People

During the years of the John Law
promotion, ten thousand Germans
left their homelands to come to Louisiana. Father Pierre-
François Xavier de Charlevoix
, the Jesuit
priest who came from Canada
to Louisiana in 1721, wrote passing by the “mournful wretches” who had settled on John Law’s grant on the Arkansas River. These Germans were originally from the Rhine region, which had been devastated in the Thirty Years’ War between France and Germany from 1618 to 1648. After the war, Louis XIV had seized Alsace and Lorraine. Both Germans and French in the area suffered the consequences of war: pestilence, famine, and religious persecution. There is little wonder that the glorious picture painted of the New World enticed them to immigrate.

Only a small percentage of the German Law People, as they were called, ever reached Louisiana. Of the ten thousand, only about six thousand actually left Europe. They lay crowded in French ports for months, awaiting the departure of vessels. They starved, fell ill with disease, and died in the ports. Many survivors died on the “pest ships” from lack of food and water or diseases contracted when the ships stopped in Santo Domingo. Only about two thousand reached the New World. They disembarked in Biloxi and on Dauphin Island and still more perished.

One important group of Germans was led by Karl Freidrich D’Arensbourg. They arrived in Biloxi in June 1721, where they met the survivors of some of the “pest ships.” D’Arensbourg organized the survivors, and they settled on the banks of the Mississippi, about twenty-five miles upriver of New Orleans.

Map of the settlement of the German Coast around Louisiana. By Hanno Delier, 1909.
(Courtesy the University of Pennsylvania)

Meanwhile, an earlier group of Germans who had settled on the Arkansas River in 1720 had been too ill and too busy providing shelter to have produced a crop by 1721. No financial help came from bankrupt John Law. So, in January 1722, they abandoned their concession and descended upon New Orleans, where they demanded passage to Europe. Bienville tried to induce them to remain. They were given rich lands near the “D’Arensbourg Germans” in the area that is today called the German Coast (the parishes of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist).

Hanno Delier tells us that these “Arkansas Germans,” on their descent to New Orleans, must have met their fellow countrymen, the D’Arensbourg Germans, who had just settled there. This was undoubtedly a determining factor in their decision to accept Bienville’s offer of the land in the area. The descendants of those early settlers still live in the area first called “La Côte des Allemands,” and later “Des Allemands.” These early German settlers brought much stability to the colony with their successful farming and were better able to endure the climate than the French.

There was a shortage of unmarried women in the colony, and the men were forced to take Indian squaws as brides.

“Send me wives for my Canadians,” Bienville wrote to Paris. “They are running in the woods after Indian girls.” In 1721, eighty-eight girls from a house of correction in Paris,
La Salpêtrière,
arrived in the city under the care of three Gray Sisters and a midwife, who was nicknamed
La Sans Regret.

Within a month, nineteen had married and ten died, leaving fifty-nine to be cared for, which was not an easy task, as they were girls who “could not be restrained.” They are to be distinguished from the Casket Girls, who did not arrive until 1728. The latter came to Mobile and Biloxi to be wives to the settlers. They were from good middle class families, and they were skilled in housewifely duties and excellent of character. The Ursuline nuns claim that there is no historical basis for the story that they came to New Orleans.

Some of the concessionaires that came to work their own land are worthy of mention.