These documents, with the narrative ascribed to the engineer Lery, are the contemporary authorities on which the foregoing account is based. CHAPTER XIII. 1697-1750. LOUISIANA. The Mississippi to be occupied.--English Rivalry.--Iberville.--Bienville.--Huguenots.--Views of Louis XIV.--Wives for the Colony.--Slaves.--La Mothe-Cadillac.--Paternal Government.--Crozat's Monopoly.--Factions.--The Mississippi Company.--New Orleans.--The Bubble bursts.--Indian Wars.--The Colony firmly established.--The two Heads of New France. At the beginning of the eighteenth century an event took place that was to have a great influence on the future of French America. This was the occupation by France of the mouth of the Mississippi, and the vindication of her claim to the vast and undefined regions which La Salle had called Louisiana. La Salle's schemes had come to nought, but they were revived, seven years after his death, by his lieutenant, the gallant and faithful Henri de Tonty, who urged the seizure of Louisiana for three reasons,--first, as a base of attack upon Mexico; secondly, as a depot for the furs and lead ore of the interior; and thirdly, as the only means of preventing the English from becoming masters of the West.[287] Three years later, the Sieur de Remonville, a friend of La Salle, proposed the formation of a company for the settlement of Louisiana, and called for immediate action as indispensable to anticipate the English.[288] The English were, in fact, on the point of taking possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, and were prevented only by the prompt intervention of the rival nation. If they had succeeded, colonies would have grown up on the Gulf of Mexico after the type of those already planted along the Atlantic: voluntary immigrants would have brought to a new home their old inheritance of English freedom; would have ruled themselves by laws of their own making, through magistrates of their own choice; would have depended on their own efforts, and not on government help, in the invigorating consciousness that their destinies were in their own hands, and that they themselves, and not others, were to gather the fruits of their toils. Out of conditions like these would have sprung communities, not brilliant, but healthy, orderly, well rooted in the soil, and of hardy and vigorous growth.