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GROWTH OF THE LOUISIANA PROVINCE.

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the province of Louisiana cover, that it possessed that almost certain guarantee for continued integral existence, an interior commerce almost or entirely self-sufficient and self-sustaining. Yearly the number of keel-boats and barges increased, on which there came down from the upper valley, flour, pork, bacon, hides, leather, tallow, bears'-oil, furs, lumber, all the products of fertile temperate regions; and in which there went up the equivalents; the rice, indigo, tobacco, sugar, cotton; for all these rich staples were already naturalized in the colony, on the lower banks of the Mississippi; as well as the manufactured merchandise of distant Europe. There was once or twice a destructive tornado, or a cruel frost; but the strong province no longer felt such a dispensation as anything more than a light misfortune.

M. de Vaudreuil, to check the growing incursions of the Chickasaws, led against them the expedition which has already been alluded to; but the warlike savages were fortified even better than before; and from their inaccessible holds, which were so regularly and strongly palisaded, ditched, and flanked with block-houses as to be impregnable without artillery, they safely beheld the devastation of their crops and the destruction of their wigwams; a futile vengeance, of little significance to them, and of less to Vaudreuil, who had to carry his unsatisfied wrath back with him, and unlaurelled to digest it as he might.

Now, however, commenced the old French war; that savage eight years' struggle between England and France, which was to wrench the supremacy upon this continent from the latter power, and to detain it for a few years in the hands of the former, as if in temporary trust, for the use of the strong republic in whose grasp it now remains. All along the vast frontier line, England and France meddled with frontiersmen and savages; and all along the line the hot but flickering flame of the Indian wars began to burn. The chief struggle, however, was in Canada; the settlements in Louisiana and the Illinois, girt by wide and pathless forests, remained untouched by the war, and peacefully pursued their farming and their trade. The only sorrow that fell upon them was the embarrassment arising from the inundation of government drafts and notes set afloat in payınent for supplies, which it could not redeem, and which hampered and perplexed the business of the valley until the end of the war.

One day in the early part of this war, a fleet of boats and barges is descried, descending the yellow current of the river. It is moored at the city, and a toilworn band of Frenchmen, ragged, penniless, famine-struck, along with sad wives and mournful children, disembarks. They enter the astonished town, as suppliants for charity. Their doleful story is soon told. Nearly three thousand miles away.

DESTRUCTION OF A FRENCH COLONY.

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upon the bleak northern shores of Acadia, first under the mild government of their native France, and afterwards under the harsher but unresisted dominion of the English, they had inhabited the pleasant homes which their brave industry had conquered from the inhospitable soil and climate. The English court, on the heartless, baseless, and cruel pretence that these simple hearted habitans would rise against their conquerors, in aid of their brethren in Canada, deliberately resolved upon the fiendish measure of rooting up, robbing, and casting forth into helpless beggary the people of the entire province. Upon this devil's errand came an army to seize them, and a fleet to carry them. Helpless and unarmed, resistance was impossible, undreamed of. Lest, however, they should seek to return to their desolate homes, their money and property are stripped from them, and those homes are burned before their very eyes. Thus houseless and destitute, the stupefied wretches are hurried aboard of the fleet, and in miserable groups, as pirates use their victims, landed naked and despairing on one and another barren sand-hill all along the desert coast of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.

The compassion of the neighboring people and authorities furnished them the necessary succor. But not able to endure the tongue even, or the companionship, of these subjects of the tyrant power,

with a desperate bardihood nearly allied to the resistless stings of instinct, they gathered up the little resources which the friendly Anglo-Americans gave them, set their faces steadfastly westward, and in spite of peril and hardship, traversed a thousand miles of pathless primeval forest; embarked on the Ohio; and floated down two thousand miles more to the settlements of their happier kinsmen.

Every

The whole city rose up to meet them. heart and home was opened wide to receive the unfortunate wanderers, to minister to their wants, to relieve their sorrows. Public benevolence vied with private charity in the noble strife of kindness. An allotment of land was granted to every family, and until they should be settled in the safe possession of means for their own support, to every household was dealt out from the royal store-houses, seeds, husbandman's tools, and daily sufficient rations of food. Thus was settled next above the "German Coast," which had been allotted to the refugees from the Arkansas settlement, that stretch of the Mississippi shore yet known as the " Acadian Coast." That neighborhood yet contains many of the descendents of those wanderers from the north, and in their hearts yet burns the fire of inextinguishable herediary enmity against the nation of their brutal oppressors, the English.

The war raged fiercely in the north; and over one

CESSION OF TERRITORY TO THE BRITISH. 257

stronghold after another, the British lion replaced the white flag of France. Large numbers of Canadians, fleeing from the hated dominion of their conquerors, following upon the track of the Acadians, or across the well-known route through the Illinois country, came down the river; some halting, and settling however, on the Upper Mississippi; and thus the population of the province received a large and valuable augmentation at the expense of Britain.

In 1763, by the treaty of Paris, the beaten and humbled kingdom of France, exhausted with the long and distant struggle, unwillingly yielded the prize of the strife, and ceded to England the enormous territory of Canada and the whole Mississippi valley, east of the river, except a small portion south of Bayou Iberville (or Manchac), including New Orleans. By the same treaty Spain ceded to England the whole of Florida; and thus did Great Britain gain all North America east of the Mississippi.

The French posts in the Illinois, and Forts Rosalie, Baton Rouge, Toulouse, and Condé, were soon in the hands of English garrisons, and the southern portion of the new acquisition being erected into the governments of East and West Florida, the provincial organizations of the English were speedily completed, upon a sort of mixed footing, half military and half civil. Many of the French, impatient of

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