Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/184

 *tended by a trip made by Bienville across the Red River, an important tributary of the Mississippi, to Natchitoches; and about the same time Le Sœur, another adventurous Frenchman, ascended the great river as far as the Falls of St. Anthony, penetrating into the prairies of Missouri, and spending a whole winter among the Iowa Indians.

Unfortunately, these isolated efforts were not seconded by any well-organized attempts to trace the courses of the affluents of the Mississippi, or to gain information respecting the habits of the natives; and the vast tracts on either side of the Father of Waters remained pathless wastes to the European throughout the reign of the French in the Southern States. That reign, however, was not of very long duration. Yellow fever and other terrible complaints, which still have their haunt in the low lands on the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, soon began to work havoc among the settlers at Mobile and the outlying homesteads; and in 1703, only one hundred and fifty of the many emigrants who had settled from time to time in Louisiana survived. In 1719, a fresh impulse, and that of an extraordinary kind, was given to emigration to the most southerly districts owned by France, by that gigantic commercial bubble known as the "Mississippi Scheme," which, projected by John Law, Comptroller-General of the finances of France in the minority of Louis XV., will long be remembered as having brought about the ruin of thousands. The company to which the working out of Law's scheme was intrusted was called the Company of the West, and owned the exclusive privilege of trading to the Mississippi, farming the taxes and coining the money of the states to be formed. Thousands of whites and hundreds of negroes to serve as their slaves, were introduced to Louisiana under the auspices of the new company; Bienville was appointed governor in the room of his brother D'Iberville, who had fallen a victim to yellow fever; a site was chosen for the capital of the empire, which was to rise from the graves of so many Europeans, and the foundation stones were laid of the modern city of New Orleans, so called in honor of the then Regent of France.

Only one short year after this imposing beginning, the Mississippi bubble burst; John Law became a bankrupt and an outcast; the lands on the Mississippi, assigned at enormous cost to those whom he had duped, remained unoccupied, and emigration suddenly ceased. The seeds already sown bore good fruit, however, in the gradual extension of the French outposts northward. The settlers who had come out to make their fortunes remained to