L INTRODUCTION EWIS AND CLARK were known in their time as the explor ers of Louisiana, and to understand what they achieved, it must be known what the Louisiana of the beginning of the nineteenth century was, and how it came to be. In the period of Columbus, when the world was full of colonizing zeal, the French were not behind the Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, or English. It was felt then, as it is felt now, that the greatness, perhaps the existence, of France depended upon the possession of a domain outside of Europe, and it is said that during the sixteenth century eighteen separate attempts were made by France to establish a foothold in America. French colonization has always proceeded in this way: brilliant adventurers, full of initiative, vividly imaginative, able and intrepid, have led the way; all that it was possible for individuals to accomplish has been accomplished again and again. Why is it that in spite of the splendid achievement of her sons France has always as a colonizing nation stood behind her contemporaries and rivals? Because her pioneer sons have never received from the government or from the nation adequate support; and in addition to that, because among themselves her path-breakers have too often found it impossible to harmonize. Call it vanity, or call it by the more honourable name ambition, this foible of powerful spirits has seemed in the case of Frenchmen to exist inordinately. These causes have repeatedly brought it about that enterprises which began full of promise have ended at last in failure. In the middle of the eighteenth century France seemed more likely than England to become the ruler of India. Rarely in any age has there been a more impressive manifestation of ability and courage than that made by those splendid sons of France, Duplaix, La Bourdonnais, Bussy, Lally-Tollendal, and Suffren. It came to nothing because they had no proper support from king or nation, still more, perhaps, because they could not agree among themselves, wasting in internal jealous bickering energy which if directed against the obstacles that confronted them might have won success. To-day in India France is a forgotten name, while England is sovereign. In America, too, where at first the prospects of French dominion seemed almost certain, utter failure was the ultimate result, — and for the same reason as in the Orient.* - Though Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence as early as 1534, New France was not founded until the coming in 1603 of Champlain, perhaps the noblest type in the whole impressive series of colonizers that went forth into the world under the banner of the lilies. In resource and courage he was matchless: in imagination he conceived such projects as occupying America with a French empire and even connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic by an Isthmian canal. In temper he seems to have been, moreover, unlike his class in general, sweet and disposed to coöperation. If properly sustained, as has been said, he would have colonized from Quebec to Florida, or westward from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi. After thirty years of heroic striving, however, he died in his little fortress at Quebec, the great wilderness about him as yet scarcely touched by any impress, his fine energy throughout his life crippled and deadened by want of sympathy and support from home. When his life went out it was like the extinction of a torch; and for a * See W. Frewen Lord's "Lost Empires of the Modern World" on this topic. generation a darkness brooded which seemed too heavy to lift. But the story of New France was to have other chapters. In 1666 landed in Canada Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, a scion from a noble Norman stock of Rouen, as well endowed perhaps with great qualities as his predecessor, who, because his lot fell in the time of Louis XIV., a prince who with all his weaknesses could yet appreciate a brave man and give him some support, worked out a magnificent achievement. He might have done still more than he did; but hampered by an unamiability which made it difficult for him to work with others, his bold and well-planned schemes encountered constantly a spirit of mutiny in the followers upon whom he relied to carry them out,-until at last, shipwrecked on the coast of Texas, deserted by the admiral whose attachment he had failed to win, and balked by the companions whom his haughtiness had estranged, he fell under the weapons of his own men, in the wilderness, in 1687. Had fortune been a little more favourable, or had he himself been less harsh and imperious, how much more he might have done! and yet scarcely any other path-breaker of the old time or the new has ever accomplished so much. Pressing on to find the road to China from the rapid at Montreal where his seigneurie was located, he did not indeed reach Cathay; but he discovered the Ohio; first of white men, in his bark the "Griffin," he traversed the great lakes, and first of white men he sailed down the Mississippi to its mouth. First of men he mapped the vast country intelligently from the great river on the west to the Atlantic, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and projected and partially built a chain of posts running from Canada to the city he meant to build at the mouth of the Mississippi. Seldom indeed has pioneer let such light in upon a wilderness as did La Salle, tramping and paddling through leagues by the thousand, undaunted though forests hung dark, though torrents dashed, and though the red-handed Iroquois haunted his trail. It was this most intrepid of explorers, who, standing not far from the Gulf, hoisting the banner of France, and entertaining in his heart chivalrous loyalty to his king, conferred the name Louisiana in 1682 upon the far-stretching territory both east and west of the river whose secrets no man knew, though he had broken a way to them. The colony which La Salle did not live to found was nevertheless established in 1699 at Biloxi, on the Gulf, by Iberville, a Canadian seigneur, who, after showing much prowess in Hudson's Bay and the West Indies, took up in Louisiana the work which La Salle left incomplete. Iberville is but a transitory figure upon our stage; but his young brother Bienville, who in 1717 founded New Orleans and long guided its destinies, steadfastly upheld the fortunes of the colony. Matters went as they have commonly gone in the history of French colonization. The king and the great people at home had small interest in the dependency except as a means of enriching themselves. It was turned over at first to the monopolist Crozat, and afterwards to John Law, to be exploited in the Mississippi Bubble. For a long time few settlers came, and these had little thought of home-making and permanent life. They wandered off in the hunt for gold, or sought the savages to trade for furs. The Mississippi Bubble, though so disastrous in one way, and so marked by iniquity, did work a certain advantage to Louisiana. Through misrepresentation, sometimes indeed through kidnapping, some thousands of settlers, fairly respectable in character, were transferred thither. Once there they could not return, and they slowly adapted themselves to their exile. Men preponderating largely, wives were afforded by the picturesque expedient of filles à la cassette, "girls with little trunks,”— en |