Bienville Quotes

East Texas is red dirt – not red, in sober truth, but the orange of rust, which it basically is, ferrous oxide – and magnolias and azaleas and dogwoods, old fields long since cottoned-out, far from the Mississippi River bottomlands that were ‘rich as six feet up a bull’s ass’: a land of hogs and hominy, and a tangled, grim past of slavery and segregation. It could as easily be the country as far eastwards of the Mississippi as it is west: it would fit all too readily into the area between Brandon and Meridian, Mississippi, hard by the Bienville National Forest.

Work by a Bienville-born historian had recently proved that on at least two occasions—even as he carried on a romance with a very young woman from Natchez—the fifty-year-old Burr had met with his attorney in McFadyen’s Tavern in Bienville.

After the buffet dinner of seafood gumbo, snow crab claws, oysters Bienville, crawfish étouffée, and creole jambalaya

BLACK MUSIC DIDN’T stop with the blues in Mississippi but followed the river to its end, to New Orleans, an island in a swamp created by the natural levees the river left behind after centuries of floods. It was the only place for miles around dry enough for Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to stand on and establish it in 1718, naming it for the regent of France, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans. Philippe was a truly debauched man who slept late and never worked hard and loved food and sex, and the city has honored his memory ever since.

Iberville, the Father of Louisiana, died of yellow fever in 1706 in Havana, leaving Bienville the acting governor of Louisiana.

Bienville granted this tract to Louis Juchereau de St. Denys, a friend from Canada and an outstanding figure in Louisiana history. He was one of the first settlers in Louisiana, arriving on his second visit with Iberville in 1699 at the age of twenty-three.

In 1723, the commissioners allowed Bienville to make New Orleans the capital of Louisiana.

the plan was a scheme to bilk money from the investors in return for selling them Louisiana. Law was given a monopoly on trade, as well. Later, when it turned out that Law’s company was merely a large confidence game, many of the settlers decided to ignore this and stay on. During the first year of Law’s operation, he decided that a town should be founded at a spot that could be reached from both Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. In 1718, this town became La Nouvelle Orleans. Development of the city began that year, but work was slow, thanks to brutal heat and the rising and falling waters of the Mississippi. There was talk of moving the city because of the danger of flooding, so levees were constructed, which spread out as the city and the plantations of the area grew. But rising water was not the only danger that could be found at the mouth of the Mississippi. In many early documents, writers spoke of the monsters that dwelt in the murky waters, and the Indian legends told of gigantic beasts that waited to spring upon unwary travelers. “May God preserve us from the crocodiles!” wrote Father Louis Hennepin. Meanwhile, John Law was having problems holding up his end of the bargain that he made with the French. In order to get his money, he had promised his investors that he would have a colony of six thousand settlers and three thousand slaves by 1727. His problem, however, was a shortage of women. The colony’s governor, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, wrote, “The white men are running in the woods after the Indian girls.” About 1720, one solution to cure the shortage of women arrived when the jails of Paris were emptied of prostitutes. The ladies of the evening were given a choice: serve their term in prison or become a colonist in Louisiana. Those who chose the New World quickly became the wives of the men most starved for female companionship. The prisons also served as a source for male colonists. Many thieves, vagabonds, deserters and smugglers also chose to come to Louisiana to avoid prison time. They made for strange company when mixed with aristocrats, indicted for some wrongdoing or another, who also chose New Orleans over the Bastille. New Orleans also lacked education and medical care. Despairing over the conditions, Governor Bienville coaxed the sisters of Ursuline to come from France and assist the new city. The first Ursulines arrived in 1727 and set to work caring for orphans, operating