France had placed on record her claim to the whole of the Great West.On a June morning in 1671 there had been a striking scene at Sainte Marie du Saut.The French had summoned a great throng of Indians to the spot.There, with impressive ceremony, Saint-Lusson, an officer from Canada, had set up a cedar post on which was a plate engraved with the royal arms, and proclaimed Louis XIV lord of all the Indian tribes and of all the lands, rivers, and lakes, discovered and to be discovered in the region stretching from the Atlantic to that other mysterious sea beyond the spreading lands of the West.Henceforth at their peril would the natives disobey the French King, or other states encroach upon these his lands.A Jesuit priest followed Saint-Lusson with a description to the savages of their new lord, the King of France.He was master of all the other rulers of the world.At his word the earth trembled.He could set earth and sea on fire by the blaze of his cannon.The priest knew the temper of his savage audience and told of the King's warriors covered with the blood of his enemies, of the rivers of blood which flowed from their wounds, of the King's countless prisoners, of his riches and his power, so great that all the world obeyed him.The savages gave delighted shouts at the strange ceremony, but of its real meaning they knew nothing.What they understood was that the French seemed to be good friends who brought them muskets, hatchets, cloth, and especially the loved but destructive firewater which the savage palate ever craved.
The mystery of the Great Lakes once solved, there still remained that of the Western Sea.The St.Lawrence flowed eastward.
Another river must therefore be found flowing westward.The French were eager listeners when the savages talked of a mighty river in the west flowing to the sea.They meant, as we now suppose, the Mississippi.There are vague stories of Frenchmen on the Mississippi at an earlier date; but, however this may be, it is certain that in the summer of 1673 Louis Joliet, the son of a wagon-maker of Quebec, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, reached and descended the great river from the mouth of the Wisconsin to a point far past the mouth of the Ohio.
France thus planted herself on the Mississippi, though there her occupation was less complete and thorough than it was on the St.
Lawrence.Distance was an obstacle; it was a far cry from Quebec by land, and from France the voyage by sea through the Gulf of Mexico was hardly less difficult.The explorer La Salle tried both routes.In 1681-1682 he set out from Montreal, reached the Mississippi overland, and descended to its mouth.Two years later he sailed from France with four ships bound for the mouth of the river, there to establish a colony; but before achieving his aim he was murdered in a treacherous attack led by his own countrymen.
It was Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, who first made good France's claim to the Mississippi.He reached the river by sea in 1699 and ascended to a point some eighty miles beyond the present city of New Orleans.Farther east, on Biloxi Bay, he built Fort Maurepas and planted his first colony.Spain disliked this intrusion; but Spain soon to be herself ruled, as France then was, by a Bourbon king--did not prove irreconcilable and slowly France built up a colony in the south.It was in 1718 that Iberville's brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded New Orleans, destined to become in time one of the great cities of North America.Its beginnings were not propitious.The historian Charlevoix describes it as being in 1721 a low-lying, malarious place, infested by snakes and alligators, and consisting of a hundred wretched hovels.
In spite of this dreary outlook, it was still true that France, planted at the mouth of the Mississippi, controlled the greatest waterway in the world.Soon she had scattered settlements stretching northward to the Ohio and the Missouri, the one river reaching eastward almost to the waters of the St.Lawrence system, the other flowing out of the western plains from its source in the Rocky Mountains.The old mystery, however, remained, for the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, into Atlantic waters already well known.The route to the Western Sea was still to be found.
It was easy enough for France to record a sweeping claim to the West, but to make good this claim she needed a chain of posts, which should also be forts, linking the Mississippi with the St.
Lawrence and strong enough to impress the Indians whose country she had invaded.At first she had reached the interior by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron, and in that northern country her position was secure enough through her posts on the upper lakes.
