Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/304

284 on the coast of Texas. Soon after, in his wanderings, his assassination by one of his dastard companions put a tragic close to the first French attempt to colonize Louisiana.

After the peace of Ryswick, in 1697, and in spite of the Spanish claim, Iberville — one of seven remarkable brothers, of a Canadian family — renewed the effort in Louisiana in 1699, accompanied by his brother Bienville, who was governor of the colony (and the actual founder of Louisiana) for forty years. He made a fortification in the Bay of Biloxi, on the Mississippi. The enterprise was attended by a continuous series of strifes, quarrels, fights, and disasters. His men were utterly unwilling to perform any labor of planting or tillage on the land, even when starvation threatened them as the alternative; they preferred to spend all their time and strength on their feuds, and on venturesome predatory roamings. All their supplies of every kind, including most of their food, were brought from France. Such labor and menial work as was indispensable was put upon their abounding negro slaves. The region was steadily contested between the French and the Spaniards. The actual French settlement of Louisiana was made by the French in and around Mobile, in 1718. The remnant of the friendly tribes, harassed and exhausted by the havoc wrought by their successive tormentors, came much under the influence of the missionary priests, and became merged among the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Natchez Indians, said to have wandered from Mexico, had settled on and around the bluff on the Mississippi that bears their name. Here, in 1729, they destroyed a French garrison, with its red allies; the incident being marked in our history as one of those vengeful visitations called, distinctively, massacres, — the title being generally reserved for those not rare experiences in which the savages had the mastery. A direful slaughter attended the catastrophe, which was complete, except as some of the women and