Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/431

NEW ORLEANS 403 manufactures are inconsiderable ; mining interests are almost unknown. There are no fisheries, no naval construc tion, no large transit of immigrants, no notable Govern ment establishments except a branch mint and the custom house. There are no great educational and scientific institutions or important conservatories of art only the promising germs of such ; no famous galleries or museums ; no noted monuments ; in short, well-nigh none of that multiplicity of pursuits and opportunities that retains and multiplies rapidly a city s wealth, and makes the inspiring tumult of metropolitan life. On any hand it requires but a step or two aside from the current of commercial move ment to carry one into the bowery repose of a huge suburb rather than of a city, or, if of a city, a city of villas and cottages, of umbrageous gardens, intersected by 470 miles of unpaved streets shaded by forest trees, haunted by song birds, fragrant with a wealth of flowers that never fails a day in the year, and abundant, in season, with fruit the fig, the plum, the pomegranate, the orange. No other large city in America is so laid open to the sunshine and the air. Neither St Louis, nor Chicago, nor Philadelphia, nor New York covers so large a site as New Orleans, whose inhabitants, considerably under a quarter of a million in number, have spread out their town over an area of 155 square miles. 1 New Orleans is exceptionally interesting among cities of the United States for the picturesqueness of its older sections, and the language, tastes, and customs of a large portion of its people. Its history is comparatively short ; but it is as sombre and unique as the dark, wet cypress forest draped in long, pendent Spanish moss that once occupied its site, and which still encircles its low horizon. It was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Lemoyne do Bienville, a French Canadian, governor of the French colony which nineteen years earlier had been planted by his brother D Iberville on the neighbouring shores of the Gulf, along the eastern margin of the Bay of Biloxi. A few years after its founding, and while it was still but little more than a squalid village of deported galley-slaves, trappers, and gold hunters, it was made the capital of that vast Louisiana which loosely comprised the whole Mississippi valley to Canada on the north and without boundary on the west, under the Plan of New Orleans. commercial domain and monopoly of John Law s scheme, so famed in history under the merited nickname of the Mississippi Bubble. The names remaining in vogue in that part of the city still distin guished as the "vieux carre," or "old French quarter," continue to preserve an interesting record of these humble beginnings. The memory of French Bourbon dominion is retained in the titles, and in the foreign aspect as well, of Toulouse, and Orleans, and Du Maine, and Conti, and Bourbon, and Dauphine, and Chartres Streets ; while even more distinctly the Bourbon of Spain has superimposed his impress on frequent stuccoed wall and iron lattice, huge locks and hinges, arches and gratings, balconies, jalousies, corrugated roofs of tiles, dim corridors, cool pavements, and inner courts brightened with parterres, urns, and basins, statues half hid in roses and vines, and sound of trickling water. There are streets named from his governors, too: Unzaga, Galvez, Miro, Salcedo, Casa Calvo, Carondelet, and the Baron Carondelet s Baronne. The moated and palisaded boundaries constructed in wild and unsafe days are indicated by the wide, tree-planted, and grassy avenues named respectively from the Canal, the Rampart, and the Esplanade that lay along their course ; and the old parade ground in the midst of the early town s river front, now laid off in flower-beds, white- shelled walks, and shaven shrubbery, and known as Jackson Square, still retains, with that official title, its older name of the Place d Armes. In this quaint, sunny, and dusty old garden, surrounded by an unconscious picturesqueness of architecture not seen elsewhere in America save in one or two remote nooks, by the old cabildo and calaboza, the court-house (once the presbytery of Capuchin friars), the cathedral of St Louis, and the long row of red shops shaded by broad verandas in the streets of St Peter and St Ann, in this square is commemorated nearly every event in the colonial history of Louisiana. Here in early days were landed those cargoes of French girls supplied each with a chest of clothing by the king, and proudly famed long afterward by their numerous and prosperous descendants as the " filles a la cassette "- the girls with trfinks. Here from 1729 to 1739 rallied these motley gatherings of men white, red, and black in the buckskin and feathers of the wilderness, the gay colours, gold braid, and ruffles of royal uniforms, and the black nakedness of slavery, that with varying success made ten years war against Natchez, Yazoo, Choctaw, and Chickasaw savages. Here in 1765 the people welcomed with tears and open arms their exiled brethren from far 1 This has not been entirely within the boundaries already described. A modern part of the city, of some extent, liee on the right bank of the harbour, opposite these older portions that occupy the river front where it turns from north to east.