From the state's earliest history the rivers
and bayous of Louisiana have played a major role in its economic and political
development.
In this giant floodplain once dwelt the mysterious mound
builders. Here, too, passed the ill-starred Hernado de Soto and Rene' Robert
Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, the young Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, and the
enigmatic Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop, possessed by dreams of empire, followed
by a steady trickle of Anglo-Saxon homeseekers refugeeing from the worn lands of Georgia
and the Carolinas.
During the Civil War, the woods echoed with
the sound of marching armies, jayhawkers, guerrillas, traitors, and patriots.
Reconstruction brought with it carpetbaggers, scalawags, defeated but still-defiant
Southerners, and a number of famous out-laws. Jesse James and the Younger brothers
trod the same ground and crossed the same rivers as had James Bowie, Louis Antoine
Juchereau de Saint-Denis, and other heroes of an earlier day. Many left a name to
perpetuate an experience.
To the Indian and the French the rivers
offered locations for villages and were highways for travelers and trappers; to the
Spanish they were hazards to be crossed; to the Americans and the British they served as
international boundaries; and to the poets and writers they were haunting "bridges of
flowers."
Hernando de Soto and his band of followers
were the first white men known to gaze upon the Mississippi River. Later came other
explorers, and in 1718 Bienville and a small group of men founded New Orleans near the
mouth of the "Big River." Today the land along the Mississippi from Baton
Rouge, to New Orleans is being transformed into another Ruhr Valley.
- Northeast Louisiana
