They reached the Arkansas River in 1673, but went no farther after the Quapaw warned them of supposedly hostile native groups and Spanish posts in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The governor of Canada commissioned Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, and Louis Joliet, a French merchant, to lead a small expedition down the great river. Rumors of the existence of a “great river” connecting the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico reached French missionaries and traders during the 1660s. Like the Spanish, French colonial officials in Canada harbored dreams of crossing North America by water. The chief goal of Juan Ponce de León, Hernando de Soto, and other Spaniards was to find a navigable waterway to the Pacific Ocean. Spanish explorers “discovered” segments of the coast of the Gulf of Mexico during the sixteenth century.
The multicultural composition of the Lower Mississippi Valley remained strong even after the cession of Louisiana to Spain in 1763, the retrocession to France in 1800, and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, effectively making the state of Louisiana both representative of the diversity of the United States and unique for its distinctive colonial past. Although the French regime considered Louisiana to be a failed colonial enterprise, the diverse peoples of the territory proved essential to the nature of imperial relations among French, Spanish, English, and American interests during the eighteenth century. Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans contributed to the development of a complex frontier society at the geographic nexus of the Americas.
This map, dated 1765, shows the Louisiana Territory as claimed by France.įrench colonial Louisiana refers to the first century of permanent European settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley. French Colonial Louisiana The period of French colonial control of Louisiana dates from 1682 to 1800.Ĭourtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection.
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