The French in the Heart of AmericaFinley, John H. (John Huston)
History
The French in the Heart of America
Finley, John H. (John Huston)
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); French -- North America; Mississippi River Valley -- History
But the answer from Versailles only hastened the fulfilment of Iberville's
prophecy. It is as a page torn from a contemporaneous suburban villa
prospectus that speaks of one of those migratory settlements of Iberville
on the shores of the gulf as a "terrestrial paradise," a "Pomona," or "The
Fortunate Island." And the reality which confronts the home seeker is
usually more nearly true to the idealistic details than that which
Governor Cadillac, wishing no doubt to discredit his predecessor, reported
when he went to succeed Bienville for a time as governor: "I have seen the
garden on Dauphin Island, which had been described to me as a terrestrial
paradise. I saw there three seedling pear-trees, three seedling apple-
trees, a little plum-tree about three feet high, with seven bad plums on
it, a vine some thirty feet long, with nine bunches of grapes, some of
them withered, or rotten, and some partly ripe, about forty plants of
French melons and a few pumpkins." [Footnote: Parkman, "A Half Century of
Conflict," 1:309.]
Bienville, the brother, also deserves remembrance both in France and
America--dismissed once but exonerated, returning later to succeed the
pessimistic Cadillac and to lay the foundations of New Orleans on the only
dry spot he had found on his first journey up the river, there to plant
the seed of the fruits and melons and pumpkins of the garden on Dauphin
Island, that were to bring forth millionfold, though they have not yet
entirely crowded out the cypress and the palmetto, and the fleur-de-lis
that still grows wild and flowers brilliantly at certain seasons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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