Written accounts after the arrival of Europeans document
the decline and disappearance of many Indian groups. A reasonable
estimate of the Indian population in AD 1700 would be 15,000, formed
of six linguistic groups: CADDO in the northwest, NATCHEZ near the
middle Mississippi, Atakapa on the prairies of the southwest,
Chitimachan in the Atchafalaya Basin, Muskogean east of the
Mississippi, and Tunican in the northeast. Most were sedentary
village farmers who also hunted and fished.
Permanent European settlement was begun by France almost 200 years
after the Spanish had entered the area. Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle,
explored the Mississippi downstream to its mouth, and he claimed the entire
drainage basin for France in 1682. La Salle's efforts at colonization failed, but the
French continued in their attempt to establish a permanent
settlement. Eventually, the colony, which had also failed at BILOXI,
moved upstream on the Mississippi to the foot of the Great Raft on
the Red River, establishing the first permanent settlement in the
Louisiana Territory at Natchitoches in 1714. Colonization proceeded
under the direction of Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d' IBERVILLE and his
brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de BIENVILLE.
The early history of the colony is a tragic one, as the first
settlers were ill-suited to the rigors of frontier life. In 1717,
France granted a monopoly on commerce to John LAW in order to promote
development of the territory. His MISSISSIPPI SCHEME was designed to
entice investment in what he claimed was a land of fabulous mineral
wealth. The scheme fell apart in 1720, with no financial rewards to
the investors, but the territory gained population as a result of
Law's promotion.
German peasants from the Upper Rhine area contributed to the
betterment of the region when they began to settle land upstream from New Orleans in
the 1720s.
Louisiana became a French crown colony in 1731. Crops, grown on
plantations, included indigo, rice, and tobacco; trade was primarily by water, and
the few roads ran along the levees. To this day, the arpent system,
based on an old French unit of measure approximating 0.35 ha (0.85
acres), is evident in the property lines running back from the
streams.
In 1762, Louisiana was ceded to Spain as a result of the French and
Indian War, and Great Britain gained control of Florida, which
extended to the east bank of the Mississippi. At the same time,
Acadians, driven from Nova Scotia by the British, began migrating to
Louisiana. The Acadians settled in the eastern prairies around the
present site of Saint Martinville and later along the Lower
Mississippi and Bayou Lafourche.
The Spanish made feeble attempts to offset the growing French
population, but were eventually absorbed themselves. In 1800 they
returned Louisiana to France by the Treaty of San Ildefonso. Although
Napoleon I originally intended to establish a new empire in America,
he sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803. The $15-million
Louisiana-Purchase represented
about 4 cents an acre. Louisiana became the 18th state on Apr. 12,
1812, comprising the territory south of 33 deg North latitude, which
had been the Territory of Orleans. The rest became the Missouri
Territory. Not until 1819, however, were the Florida Parishes and the
lands west of the Red River added to form the present state
boundaries.
During the War-Of-1812, British ships moved up the Mississippi River
to New Orleans. On Jan. 8, 1815, Gen. Andrew Jackson's troops defeated the
British at New Orleans. The battle ended 15 days after the Treaty of
Ghent was signed, ending the war. Jean LAFITTE aided the American
cause.
By 1860 the population exceeded 700,000, and a class system based on
plantations with slave labor had developed. At the same time, yeoman farmers were
practicing subsistence farming--Anglo-Saxons in the hills and Acadians to the
south. During the Civil War, the importance of the port of New Orleans and
Louisiana's strategic position on the Mississippi made it an early
Union target; the state's economy was devastated.
Streams had been the major routes since the beginning of settlement.
By the 1860 peak of steamboat travel, nearly all of the state could be reached by
these craft. As railroads improved, steamboat traffic declined. Rail
travel grew in the early 20th century. Much of the modern settlement
of the prairies is attributable to the access rail travel gave the
area. Highway development began after the 1920s. The prairies began
to change from the arpent-strip farms of the Acadians (or Cajuns, as
they came to be known) and the rectangular Spanish sitio grants for
ranching, to vast rice fields farmed by migrants from the Middle West
who arrived at the beginning of the 20th century.
Louisiana had come a long way from the earliest Spanish explorers and
French settlers, through the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 1928 a
Winnfield lawyer, Huey Pierce Long, Jr. (see LONG family), had
obtained the governorship, and from 1930 to 1935 he served as a U.S.
senator. His program of road building and free schoolbooks, based on
tax revenue from petroleum, appealed to the grass roots population,
but his methods became increasingly suspect. Scandals, which had
begun by the mid-1930s, accelerated after Long was assassinated in
1935, but his career marked a turning point in Louisiana history.
For much of the period since World War II the petroleum industry
sparked the development of the state (with the notable exception of
the oil slump that took place during the mid-1980s). By the 1960s
Louisiana had become a major space-age industrial center; as industry
grew, the state became urbanized. Urgent environmental problems of
the 1980s included industrial pollution, disposal of toxic waste, and
erosion of the coastline.