consin to
a point far past the mouth of the Ohio.

France thus planted herself on the Mississippi, though there her
occupation was less complete and thorough than it was on the St.
Lawrence. Distance was an obstacle; it was a far cry from Quebec by
land, and from France the voyage by sea through the Gulf of Mexico
was hardly less difficult. The explorer La Salle tried both routes. In
1681-1682 he set out from Montreal, reached the Mississippi overland,
and descended to its mouth. Two years later he sailed from France
with four ships bound for the mouth of the river, there to establish a
colony; but before achieving his aim he was murdered in a treacherous
attack led by his own countrymen.

It was Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, who first made good France's
claim to the Mississippi. He reached the river by sea in 1699 and
ascended to a point some eighty miles beyond the present city of New
Orleans. Farther east, on Biloxi Bay, he built Fort Maurepas and planted
his first colony. Spain disliked this intrusion; but Spain soon to be
herself ruled, as France then was, by a Bourbon king--did not prove
irreconcilable and slowly France built up a colony in the south. It
was in 1718 that Iberville's brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de
Bienville, founded New Orleans, destined to become in time one of the
great cities of North America. Its beginnings were not propitious.
The historian Charlevoix describes it as being in 1721 a low-lying,
malarious place, infested by snakes and alligators, and consisting of a
hundred wretched hovels.

In spite of this dreary outlook, it was still true that France, planted
at the mouth of the Mississippi, controlled the greatest waterway in the
world. Soon she had scattered settlements stretching northward to the
Ohio and the Missouri, the one river reaching eastward almost to the
waters of the St. Lawrence system, the other flowing out of the western
plains from its source in the Rocky Mountains. The old mystery, however,
remained, for the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, into
Atlantic waters already well known. The route to the Western Sea was
still to be found.

It was easy enough for France to record a sweeping claim to the West,
but to make good this claim she needed a chain of posts, which should
also be forts, linking the Mississippi with the St. Lawrence and strong
enough to impress the Indians whose country she had invaded. At first
she had reached the interior by