After 1700 France’s colonial enterprise in North America stagnated. The main problem, as before, was the difficulty in persuading French people to occupy isolated settlements in remote American frontiers. But some did come. The French government built and occupied forts along the shores of the Great Lakes and at strategic positions overlooking the Mississippi, Illinois, and other rivers. Solitary French traders, paddling canoes laden with metal tools, cloth, and alcohol, ventured deep into the wilderness in search of increasingly scarce animal pelts. Jesuit missionaries endeavored to plant Christianity among the Indians. Missionaries founded Detroit in 1701, Kaskaskia (south of Cahokia) in 1703, and Fort de Chartres in 1720.
Attempts to anchor New France with a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi were frustrated by the region’s maze of swamps, marshes, and meandering waterways which, though ideal for pirates, discouraged settlement. One French missionary, unable to locate the mouth of the Mississippi, complained that the “coast changes shape at every moment.” In 1712 France chartered a private company to build a colony in the region. It laid out a town called New Orleans at the site of a short portage between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. The company granted tracts of land to settlers and transported several thousand of them to Louisiana. Some established farms, planting indigo, tobacco, rice, and cotton; others acquired forest products, such as lumber, tar, and resin; and still others traded for furs. The company established more settlements in the region, including one at Natchez, on a bluff above the Mississippi. But in 1729 the Natchez Indians wiped out the settlement. The company went bankrupt.
In 1731 the French government took control of Louisiana, with New Orleans as its administrative capital. Settlement lagged. The region was unsuited for farming, bemoaned one French official: “Now there is too much drought, now too much rain.” By 1750 no more than 10,000 Europeans had colonized the region.
Few European women were among the immigrants to New France. In Louisiana, Frenchmen often married Indian women in Christian ceremonies,
In 1718, to strengthen its claim to Illinois, the French government removed the region from Canadian supervision and put it under the jurisdiction of the Company of the Indies. Later that year the company sent a military expedition from New Orleans to Illinois. It soon completed Fort de Chartres on the Mississippi River north of Kaskaskia. The log structure did not last long; in 1760 a stone structure, partially reconstructed as shown, was completed.
Although the government tried to discourage the practice. Fur traders in the northern hinterlands also married Indians, whose knowledge of Indian languages, cultural practices, and tribal relations proved helpful for business and essential for survival. Interracial children were common.
As beaver and other game became scarce, traders ventured farther west. Eventually they came upon tribes that had been driven from Pennsylvania and New York by the mighty Iroquois confederation. These Indians, fearful of the Iroquois, sought guns and ammunition. The traders complied, though not without misgivings. This escalation in armaments ensured that warfare would be more deadly, and that the isolated outposts of New France would be more vulnerable.
World History
