While the French and Spanish traders and soldiers were settling down on the Red River and in Texas, in the posts and missions which were to determine the boundaries between Texas and Louisiana, La Mothe himself was not idle. In 1715 he went up to Illinois in search of silver mines. He brought back lead ore, but no silver. In 1716 the tribe of the Natchez showed signs of restlessness, and attacked some of the French. Bienville was sent with a small force of thirty-four soldiers and fifteen sailors to bring this powerful tribe to terms. He succeeded by deceit in accomplishing what he could not have done by fighting, and actually compelled the Indians, through fear for the lives of some chiefs whom he had treacherously seized, to construct a fort on their own territory, the sole purpose of which was to hold them in awe. From that date a garrison was maintained at Natchez. Bienville, who was then commissioned as “Commandant of the Mississippi and its tributaries,” was expected to make this point his headquarters. The jealousy between himself and La Mothe had ripened into open quarrel. The latter covered reams of paper with his crisp denunciations of affairs in Louisiana, until Crozat, worn out with his complaints, finally wrote, “I am of opinion that all the disorders in the colony of which M. de la Mothe complains proceed from his own maladministration of affairs.” No provision was made in the early days of the colony for the establishment of a legal tribunal; military law alone prevailed. By an edict issued Dec. 18, 1712, the governor and _commissaire-ordonnateur_ were constituted a tribunal for three years from the day of its meeting, with the same powers as the councils of Santo Domingo and Martinique. The tribunal was afterward re-established with increased numbers and more definite powers. On the 23d day of August, 1717, the Regent accepted a proposition made to him by Sieur Antony Crozat to remit the remainder of the term of his exclusive privilege. Although it must have wounded the pride of a man like Crozat to acknowledge that so gigantic a scheme, fraught with such exaggerated hopes and possibilities, was a complete failure, yet there is no record of his having undertaken to save himself by means of the annual shipload of negroes which he was authorized, under Article XIV. of his grant, to import. The late King had simply granted him permission to traffic in human beings. It remained for the Regent representing the Grand Monarque’s great-grandson to convert this permission into an absolute condition in the grant to the Company to which Crozat’s rights were assigned. The population of the colony was estimated at seven hundred of all ages, sexes, and colors, not including natives, when in March, 1717, the affairs of government were turned over to L’Epinay, the successor of La Mothe. [Illustration]