Natchitoches Natchitoches Louisiana United States
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In the latter two towns, early explorers and settlers keep the original Caddo names of the villages.
Bienville explores up the Red River as far as Natchitoches in 1700, assuring French control of the area by forming alliances with the native inhabitants.
Cadillac sends Louis Juchereau de St. Denis and a company of men from Mobile in September 1713 to travel up the Red River and establish a French outpost.
St. Denis arrives in Natchitoches later this year and builds a fort, trading with the natives and freely selling them guns.
The French learn many hunting and trapping skills from the natives.
The French settlement has two purposes: to establish trade with the Spanish in Texas, and to deter Spanish advances into Louisiana.
Also, the northern terminus of the Old San Antonio Road (sometimes called El Camino Real, or Kings Highway) is at Nachitoches.
St. Denis's parents had apparently been able to send him from his native Montreal to France to further his education.
He had sailed in late 1699 from La Rochelle with the second expedition of Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville (a relative by marriage), arriving in Louisiana.
St. Denis had commanded a fort on the Mississippi River and another at Biloxi Bay; he has also explored to the west of the bay and upstream, where he journeyed to the lower Red River.
These expeditions have brought St. Denis into contact with the Karankawa and Caddo tribes and taught him invaluable wilderness skills specific to the area.
Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, having evaded transport to Spain by the authorities in Mexico City, had by February 1719 made his way to Natchitoches, where Spanish officials in 1721 permit his wife Manuela to join him.
The couple will spend their remaining years here at the French outpost, Le Poste des Cadodaquious, on the Red River.
From his command at Natchitoches, St. Denis is a troublesome thorn in the side of Spanish Texas, and controversy surrounds his motives to this day.
St. Denis insists that he desires to become a Spanish citizen, and his Spanish wife is proof.
Suspicious Spaniards see him as a covert agent of France.
St. Denis contributes greatly to the geographical knowledge of both France and Spain as well as bringing Spanish and French settlements into closer proximity and contact.
His contraband trade becomes a way of life on the frontier and borders of Spanish Texas and French Louisiana.
The settlement of Natchitoches had soon become a flourishing river port and crossroads; it will soon give rise to vast cotton kingdoms along the river.
Planters will develop large plantations over time and build fine homes in a growing town, a pattern that is to be repeated in New Orleans and other places.
French-Canadian explorer and soldier Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis, leader of a 1714 expedition from French-held Natchitoches, in the Louisiana Territory, to the Spanish town of San Juan Bautista (modern Villahermosa) on the Rio Grande, seeking to establish trade relations with the Spanish, had helped the Spaniards found four missions and establish a garrison in what is now Texas.
Distrusted by his countrymen, who regarded him as too pro-Spanish, and by the Spaniards, who saw him as a threat, he had been imprisoned in Mexico City for several months in 1715.
He had made a second journey to the Rio Grande in 1717, but his goods had been seized.
On arriving in Mexico City to protest the confiscation of his goods, he had been imprisoned again for several more months.
He had returned to Natchitoches in 1719, fought in the defense of Mobile and at Pensacola, and taken command of the Natchitoches area until France and Spain end hostilities in 1721.
One of the French explorers who sought to make friends with local native tribes as well as with the Spanish in Mexico and Texas, his work was short-lived.
Many of the Spanish settlements he founded in Texas cannot be maintained, and Spain and France will continue to compete on the North American continent.
After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, by which the United States has taken over the former French colonial territory west of the Mississippi River, the U.S government seeks to ally with the Caddo peoples.
During the War of 1812, American generals such as William Henry Harrison, William Clark, and Andrew Jackson crush pro-British uprisings among other Southeast Indians, in particular the Creeks.
Due to the Caddo's neutrality and their importance as a source of information for the Louisiana Territory government, they are left alone.
Along the way, Pike's party had been treated with respect and celebrated by the Mexican locals, and Pike had made careful notes of the military strength and civilian population.
Commandant General Salcedo, who is governor of the state, had released Pike and most of his men, as they are military officers of a neighboring country, with whom Spain is not at war.
Pike had been treated well and invited to formal social dinners, but still not quite given the treatment of a visiting dignitary.
Salcedo had housed Pike with Juan Pedro Walker, a cartographer who had also acted as an interpreter.
Walker had transcribed and translated Pike's confiscated documents, including his journal.
Mexican authorities fear the spread of both democracy and Protestant Christian sects that might undermine their rule.
Salcedo had ordered the repatriation of Pike, but will hold some of the soldiers of his party in jail in Mexico for years.
The Spanish military escorts Pike and some of his party back north, through San Antonio, Texas, arriving at the border with Louisiana at Natchitoches on July 1, 1807.
The Spanish formally complains to the United States Department of State about the military expedition in its territory, but the government maintains that the party had been one of exploration only.
Pike's capture by the Spanish and travels through New Mexico, northern Mexico, and Texas, have given him more information about Spanish power than his expedition could have done.