by Clare Clark
The French Crown was to cling on to her American colony, through war with the Natchez and other Native American nations, until 1763, when the Treaty of Paris ceded the territories to the east of the Mississippi to England, those on the western side to Spain. France would not regain control of the colony until 1800, and her triumph was brief. In 1803 Napoleon sold Louisiana to President Jefferson for $15 million, or four cents an acre, doubling at a stroke the size of the United States. Upon completion of the agreement, Napoleon declared that ‘this accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride’. Though divorced from their newly acquired compatriots by their religion, customs, law, governance and language, the descendants of those first French colonists, by now known familiarly as Creoles, would surely have derived some comfort from that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe a significant debt to those writers, past and present, who have sought to cast light on this little-known period in American history. There are far too many to mention here, but I should like to express my particular gratitude to Jay Higginbotham for his extraordinary history of Mobile, Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane 1702–1711, without which I should never have been able to write this novel. I have leaned heavily on the definitive histories of Louisiana by Charles Gayarré and Marcel Giraud, as well as plundering George Oudard’s Four Cents an Acre and Peter J. Hamilton’s Colonial Mobile. The journal Louisiana History also proved an invaluable source of articles covering every aspect of the region’s colonial history.
A range of contemporary accounts provided crucial insight into the period, in particular Fleur de Lys and Calumnet, the journal of a carpenter in Louisiana, ably translated and edited by Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams, and History of Louisiana, the observations of Le Page Du Pratz, a Frenchman who arrived in Louisiana in 1717. The journals of Sauvole, the first governor of Louisiana, and of Pierre d’Iberville, the latter translated and edited by Carl A. Brasseaux, were also enormously useful. For access to these and other rare volumes, I would like to thank the staff of the Williams Research Center in New Orleans, where I was also able to draw upon a matchless collection of contemporary maps and prints.
For details of Native American life in the early eighteenth century, I am indebted to Jon Manchip White’s Everyday Life of the North American Indian, to Daniel H. Usner Jr’s Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, and to Angie Debo, not only for her terrific A History of the Indians of the United States but also for H. B. Cushman’s History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, which she so capably edited and annotated. As for the story of John Law, it would be difficult to find a more erudite and enjoyable source than Janet Gleeson’s The Moneymaker.
My final acknowledgement, however, must go to Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais, more than five hundred years after his death, continue to rouse, inspire and delight all who read them. To him, and all the other scholars whose works I have plundered, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks. The weight of their scholarship underpins this novel, while any errors that may be contained within its pages are entirely my own.
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Copyright © Clare Clark 2010
Clare Clark has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
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Detail from Guillaume de Lisle’s ‘Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi’ (Covens & Mortier, 1742) reproduced by kind permission of the David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com
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