Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/185

 struggle for bare existence, and the middle of the 18th century found the northern half of Louisiana under the care of Jesuit missionaries, while the seaboard districts were watched over by Capuchin friars. The presence of these zealous teachers of Christianity could not, however, prevent many a terrible struggle with the natives, who again and again made a futile effort to rid themselves of the intruders, the justice of whose appropriation of their lands they naturally failed to see.

NEW ORLEANS.

Into the terrible details of Indian massacres and French retaliations we need not enter here; suffice it to say, that when, in 1754, an English grant of lands to the Ohio Company brought on the French war, the soil of the Mississippi valley had already received that baptism of native blood which seems to have been everywhere a preliminary sowing for the harvests of the white man. The struggle which gave to Great Britain the vast hyperborean regions of America, and to which we shall have presently to refer again, also shook the power of France in the South, and resulted, first, in the cession,