French is still spoken in Quebec and New Orleans, reminders that the land of the lilies had much to do with the settlement of North America. Many of the greatest explorers of the continent were Frenchmen. Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River in 1534, and Champlain in 1603 founded New France, and from his small fortress at Quebec planned an empire that should reach to Florida. In 1666 Robert Cavalier, the Sieur de La Salle, came to Canada, and set out from his _seigneurie_ near the rapids of Montreal to find the long-sought road to China. Instead of doing that he discovered the Ohio River, first of white men he voyaged across the Great Lakes and sailed down the Mississippi to its mouth. Great explorer, he mapped the country from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic Ocean, and built frontier-posts in the wilderness. He traveled thousands of miles, and in 1682 he raised the lilies of France near the mouth of the Mississippi and named the whole territory he had covered _Louisiana_, in honor of King Louis XIV of France. The first colony on the Gulf was established seventeen years later at Biloxi by a Canadian _seigneur_ named Iberville. Soon afterward this _seigneur's_ brother, Bienville, founded New Orleans and attracted many French pioneers there. The French proved to be better explorers than farmers or settlers. In the south they hunted the sources of the Arkansas and Red Rivers, and discovered the little-known Pawnee and Comanche Indians. In the north they pressed westward and came in sight of the Rocky Mountains. At that time it seemed as if France was to own at least two-thirds of the continent. The English general, Braddock, was defeated at Fort Duquesne in 1755, and the French commanded the Ohio as well as the Mississippi; but four years later the English general, Wolfe, won the victory of the Plains of Abraham near Quebec; and France's chance was over. Men in Paris who knew little concerning the new world did not scruple to give away their country's title to vast lands. The French ceded Canada and all of La Salle's old province of Louisiana east of the Mississippi, except New Orleans, to England. Soon afterward France, to outwit England, gave Spain New Orleans and her claim to the half of the Mississippi Valley west of the river to which the name Louisiana now came to be restricted. The French, however, were great adventurers by nature, and Napoleon, changing the map of Europe, could not keep his fingers from North America. He planned to win back the New France that had been given away. Spain was weak, and Napoleon traded a small province in Italy for the great tract of Louisiana. He meant to colonize and fortify this splendid empire, but before it could be done enemies gathered against his eagles at home, and to save his European throne he had to forsake his western colony.