Pierre Le Moyne D'Iberville - Exploring Louisiana

Exploring Louisiana

In 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle was the first European to travel from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. From the 1690s, the French began dreaming of building a great empire by linking the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi basins and bottling up the English on the east coast. This presented diplomatic problems because the Gulf coast was claimed, but not occupied, by Spain. Pontchartrain, the minister for naval affairs and colonies gave Iberville the task of relocating the mouth of the Mississippi which La Salle had failed to find on his last voyage and to build a fort which would block the river to other nations. Iberville left Brest with four ships in October 1698. He sailed along the Florida coast and past the new base the Spanish were building at Pensacola. In March 1699, he entered the Birdfoot Delta. It was only after meeting some Indians who recalled La Salle that he was sure that this was the Mississippi. Having achieved his first aim and finding no good sites in the delta, he built a temporary fort at Biloxi, left a garrison of 81 men, and returned to France. On his second voyage he reached Biloxi on January 1700 and built a "Fort Maurepas" (sic) 40 miles up the Mississippi River. On his return journey, he is said to have stopped at New York and sold 9,000 furs that coureurs des bois had given him in preference to hauling them back to Montreal. (This story illustrates the benefits of the New Orleans area as a port, the size of the French presence on the Mississippi at this early date and Iberville's rather questionable business practices.) On his third voyage in February 1701, he built a second fort at Mobile. Here, Henri Tonty aided him in establishing good relations with the Indians. He left Louisiana for the last time in April 1702. His brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded New Orleans in 1719.