Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/87



River and built a fort at the mouth of the Osage. In 1710 the first African negroes were taken into the new French colony and slavery was established in Louisiana.

After the death of D'Iberville, his brother, Bienville, became Governor of Louisiana. In 1717 the entire trade of the Mississippi Valley was granted by a charter from the French king to the “Western Company” for twenty-five years. The absolute control of the French possession was by this grant turned over to the corporation, even to the selection of its Governor and all military officers, the command of its forts, vessels and armies. The company was bound to introduce into Louisiana, during the period of its charter, six thousand white settlers and three thousand negro slaves. Bienville was chosen Governor of the whole province. He at once founded a city and established a colony on the banks of the Mississippi.

The shores were low, flat and swampy for more than a hundred miles from its mouth, but the Governor selected a site where New Orleans now stands for the capital, and proceeded to clear the dense forest that covered it. He laid out the city and gave it the name it now bears. The first cargo of slaves, direct from Africa, was landed on the west bank of the river opposite the new city in 1719. It consisted of five hundred men, women and children, forcibly torn from their homes, transported in a slave ship, and sold out to the colonists at an average price of one hundred and fifty dollars each.

From 1756 to 1762 war was waged by England against France for the conquest of Canada, and all of the French possessions in the Mississippi Valley. After a conflict in which the colonists and many tribes of Indians took part, the English armies succeeded in wresting Canada from the French, and in 1763 a treaty of peace was concluded by which England secured all of the French territory east of the Mississippi River, except a region east of New Orleans. The king of France at the same time, by a secret treaty, ceded to Spain all of the remainder of