Review of the History of Discoveries: Mississippi

The French had now traversed the interior of America from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia by way of the St. Lawrence, the chain of the great lakes and the Mississippi River, to the Gulf of Mexico, and asserted the authority of King Louis everywhere. Trading-posts, mission-stations, and colonies followed in the path of the explorers. New Orleans was founded early in the eighteenth century. Other places were settled on the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the lakes. At the middle of the last century, the French claimed dominion over the whole continent north of the Spanish possessions, excepting the narrow border of territory on the sea-coasts occupied by the English. They coveted the whole country, and resolved to possess it. Their alliance with the Indians, through the influence of the Jesuits, had that permanent object in view; and we have seen how fearfully those allies worked along the frontier settlements of New England, with torch and hatchet, to accomplish that end. Had they succeeded in their attempted conquest of New England, the Iroquois Confederacy, that stood like a wall of defence for the settlers in New York and Pennsylvania, might have been swept away, and the day-dreams of Louis the Fourteenth, that he was to become sole master of North America, been realized. The struggle for that mastery continued forty-five years after his death, and was ended only when the English had destroyed French dominion in America, by force of arms, and by conquest stripped France of a great portion of its claimed territory in our country.