ear." "English Turn,"
the name given to a great bend in the stream some miles below New
Orleans, keeps alive the memory of that piece of shrewdness. Not far
distant, by the way, is the field where, in 1815, the British regulars,
under Sir Edward Pakenham, received a disastrous defeat at the hands of
Andrew Jackson and his American riflemen.

Iberville planted his first settlement at Biloxi, {283} on Mississippi
Sound. Other French posts were shortly afterward established on Cat
Island, Dauphin Island, which is at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and at
Mobile. A little later Bienville built a fort fifty-four miles above
the mouth of the Great River, and he early began to insist that the
future of the colony lay on its banks, not on the shores and sandy
islands of the Gulf. But the time had not yet come when his ideas
would prevail. The wretched colony must first go through a dismal
experience of languishing, in consequence of which the seat of
government was removed to Mobile, and of actual famine.

At last, in 1718, Bienville, who by the death of his brother had
succeeded to the direction of affairs, with twenty-five convicts from
France and as many carpenters and some voyageurs from the Illinois
River, founded the city of New Orleans.

At the first the outlook was far from hopeful. The site was but a few
feet above the sea-level and was subject to constant inundation. Most
unfavorable reports went back to Mobile, which for five years longer
remained the seat of government. The population, too, was rude and
lawless, being made up of trappers, redemptioners having a period of
years to serve, transported {284} females, inmates of the House of
Correction, Choctaw squaws, and negro slave women--all, as an old
writer says, "without religion, without justice, without discipline,
without order, without police."

Bienville, however, held firmly to his purpose and, in 1723, procured
the royal permission to transfer the seat of government from Mobile to
the new settlement on the banks of the Great River. Thus, at last, was
La Salle's prophetic dream realized. France had become awake to the
importance of concentrating her strength where it could be effective,
rather than frittering it away on the shores of the Gulf.

One of the most striking evidences of the warm interest which the King
felt in the colony was his sending out, in 1728, a number of decent
girls, each with a trunk filled with linen and clothing (from which