icated by
rapid changes in government as to confuse the student, rendering it
extremely difficult to comprehend correctly the varied and conflicting
interests--aristocratic, official, and commercial--actuating her
pioneer colonists. The written records, so far as translated and
published, afford only a faint reflection of the varied characteristics
of her peculiar, changing population. The blue-eyed Arcadian of her
western plateaus, yet dreaming upon his more northern freedom; the
royalist planter of the Mississippi bottoms, proud of those broad acres
granted him by letters-patent of the King; the gay, volatile,
passionate Creole of the town, one day a thoughtless lover of pleasure,
the next a truculent wielder of the sword; the daring smugglers of
Barataria, already rapidly drifting into open defiance of all legal
restraint; together with the quiet market gardeners of the
_Cote-des-Allemands_, formed a heterogeneous population impossible to
please and extremely difficult to control.

Varied as were these types, yet there were others, easy to name, but
far more difficult to classify in their political relationships--such
as priests of the Capuchin order; scattered representatives of Britain;
sailors from ships ever swinging to the current beside the levee;
sinewy backwoodsmen from the wilds of the Blue Ridge; naked savages
from Indian villages north and east; raftsmen from the distant waters
of the Ohio and Illinois, scarcely less barbarian than those with
redder skin; Spaniards from the Gulf islands, together with a negro
population, part slave, part free, nearly equal in point of numbers to
all the rest.

And over all who was the master?

It would have been difficult at times to tell, so swiftly did change
follow change--Crozat, Law, Louis the Fifteenth, Charles the Third,
each had his turn; flag succeeded flag upon the high staff which, ever
since the days of Bienville, had ornamented the Place d'Armes, while
great merchants of Europe played the occupants of thrones for the
bauble of this far western province, whose heart, nevertheless,
remained forever faithful to sunny France.

As late as 1768 New Orleans contained scarcely more than three thousand
two hundred persons, a third of these being black slaves. Sixty-three
years previously Bienville had founded Louisiana Province, making
choice of the city site, but in 1763 it suited the schemes of him, who
ruled the destinies of the mother country, to convey the