Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans Read Online Free PDF Page B

middle of a swamp, but Bienville persevered, and the “beautiful crescent” became the city of La Nouvelle Orléans.
    In June, 1718, Bienville wrote in his diary:
    We are working at Nouvelle Orleans with as much zeal as the shortage of men will permit. I myself conveyed over the spot to select the place where it will be the best to locate the settlement . . . I am grieved to see so few people engaged in a task which requires at least a hundred times the number. All the ground of the site, except the borders, which are drowned by floods, are very good and everything will grow there. (Kendall 1922, 5).
    John Law ordered a garrison, a director’s building and lodging, for the director’s staff to be built to establish the beginnings of trade.
    Some inhabitants of the city in 1718 were Bienville, his Intendant (the head of civil affairs), surveyors (the Lassus brothers from Mobile), carpenters, troops, and a few concessionaires. There was de La Tour, the Royal engineer; Pauger, second engineer; Ignace Broutin, who built the Ursuline Convent; doctors; priests; and soldiers. French soldiers usually had a secondary trade. Some were wigmakers, rope makers, weavers, gardeners, shoemakers, laborers, brewers, locksmiths, bakers, papermakers, and cabinet makers.
    Costumes of French soldiery in the early eighteenth century. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)
    In June 1718, the first wave of European immigrants began to arrive in response to John Law’s campaign at the same time that Bienville was supervising the work in New Orleans. Three hundred came in three ships, accompanied by five hundred soldiers and convicts to make a total of eight hundred coming into a colony where only seven hundred lived, thus doubling, in one day, the population of Louisiana (Delier 1909, 18).
    They were held, for lack of a better place, on Dauphin Island. They were crowded, unsheltered, hungry, and wretched. Many starved and died, but there was no place else to go until Governor Bienville could come for them with his few boats and his few men to distribute them around the countryside. Some he sent to Natchez, some to the valley of the Yazoo River, and some to New Orleans, where they were crowded into tents and rough sheds.
    John Law’s career ended with his flight from Paris as a bankrupt and a fugitive on December 10, 1720. He fled to the Belgian frontier in a coach lent to him by Madame Brié with escorts provided to him by the Duc d’Orléans.
    The German Law People
    During the years of the John Law promotion, ten thousand Germans left their homelands to come to Louisiana. Father Pierre- François Xavier de Charlevoix , the Jesuit priest who came from Canada to Louisiana in 1721, wrote passing by the “mournful wretches” who had settled on John Law’s grant on the Arkansas River. These Germans were originally from the Rhine region, which had been devastated in the Thirty Years’ War between France and Germany from 1618 to 1648. After the war, Louis XIV had seized Alsace and Lorraine. Both Germans and French in the area suffered the consequences of war: pestilence, famine, and religious persecution. There is little wonder that the glorious picture painted of the New World enticed them to immigrate.
    Only a small percentage of the German Law People, as they were called, ever reached Louisiana. Of the ten thousand, only about six thousand actually left Europe. They lay crowded in French ports for months, awaiting the departure of vessels. They starved, fell ill with disease, and died in the ports. Many survivors died on the “pest ships” from lack of food and water or diseases contracted when the ships stopped in Santo Domingo. Only about two thousand reached the New World. They disembarked in Biloxi and on Dauphin Island and still more perished.
    One important group of Germans was led by Karl Freidrich D’Arensbourg. They arrived in Biloxi in June 1721, where they met the survivors of some of the “pest ships.” D’Arensbourg organized