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.
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