arved the
royal insignia upon the blazed trunk of a giant of the forest,
the while crying: "Long live Charles the Second, by the grace of
God, King of England, Scotland, France, Ireland and Virginia and
of the territories thereunto belonging."

La Salle's dream of a New France in the heart of America was
blotted out in his tragic death upon the banks of the River
Trinity (1687). Yet his mantle was to fall in turn upon the
square shoulders of Le Moyne d'Iberville and of his brother--the
good, the constant Bienville, who after countless and arduous
struggles laid firm the foundations of New Orleans. In the
precious treasury of Margry we learn that on reaching Rochelle
after his first voyage in 1699 Iberville in these prophetic words
voices his faith: "If France does not immediately seize this part
of America which is the most beautiful, and establish a colony
which is strong enough to resist any which England may have, the
English colonies (already considerable in Carolina) will so
thrive that in less than a hundred years they will be strong
enough to seize all America." But the world-weary Louis Quatorze,
nearing his end, quickly tired of that remote and unproductive
colony upon the shores of the gulf, so industriously described in
Paris as a "terrestrial paradise"; and the "paternal providence
of Versailles" willingly yielded place to the monumental
speculation of the great financier Antoine Crozat. In this Paris
of prolific promotion and amazed credulity, ripe for the colossal
scheme of Law, soon to blow to bursting-point the bubble of the
Mississippi, the very songs in the street echoed flamboyant,
half-satiric panegyrics upon the new Utopia, this Mississippi
Land of Cockayne:

It's to-day no contribution
To discuss the Constitution
And the Spanish war's forgot
For a new Utopian spot;
And the very latest phase
Is the Mississippi craze.

Interest in the new colony led to a great development of
southwesterly trade from New France. Already the French coureurs
de bois were following the water route from the Illinois to South
Carolina. Jean Couture, a deserter from the service in New
France, journeyed over the Ohio and Tennessee rivers to that
colony, and was known as "the greatest Trader and Traveller
amongst the Indians for more than Twenty years." In 1714 young
Charles Charleville accompanied an old trader from Crozat's
colony on the gulf to the great salt-springs on the Cumberland,
where a post fo