Powell gives us a detailed look at the complexity of the city that would become New Orleans and helps us understand this city that has no counterpart in the US or anywhere else. It is a city built where no city should be built and it has withstood more foreign intrigue and natural disasters than any other major city.
“During the city’s lush decades, just about everything the
Mississippi Valley sent to eastern markets had to pass through New Orleans, as
did all the buttons and textiles, shoes and wine, that mid-America received in exchange. It was as though the city were the drain plug
in an immense bathtub. And as the basin
released its county, so the city’s coffers swelled.”
In the beginning, no one wanted to make a city here, except the man who had gained ownership of the land. “The colony’s early capitals weren’t on the river. They were at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and,
after 1701, in the environs of Mobile, Alabama, many miles to the east. The capital was transferred in 1717, but not
to Louisiana. It was placed Biloxi… Only
Bienville and his supporters wanted to relocate the capital to the New Orleans
site. He had cleared that location in
1718.”
And then it was only because of our first major economic fiasco.
“But for the bursting of the [Mississippi Bubble – the first
stock market crash] New Orleans might have been built in the shadow of Baton
Rouge at a now forgotten bend in the river known as Bayou Manchac. This was where officials in France, whose
word was supposed to be final, had wanted to put it.”
The river was the key, but even that was hard to find.
“The continental shoreline is pitted with these
estuaries. They are easy to make out
from the offshore. But the Mississippi’s
deltaic mouth, which is often shrouded in fog and bordered with alluvial plumes
of sediment, is practically indistinguishable from the minor streams and bayous
that spider seaward through the marshy coastland. For nearly two centuries, Spanish ships
yearly brushed the Louisiana coastline en route from Vera Cruz to Havana
without once recognizing the discharge of the prodigious stream. Extant maps of the upper Gulf Coast were
misleading. From earlier explorations
and Native American lore, Spain knew that a large river flowed into the sea
somewhere along its northern shore, but their charts showed it emptying into
the Bay of Espiritu Santo, in present-day Texas. What did catch their eye when they skirted
the Mississippi’s birdfoot passes were cones of mud that had been pressured to
the surface by river silt piling up on the ocean floor. Where the cones broke the water’s surface,
early Spanish mariners mistook them for “black rocks” palisades of “petrified
trees,” and they gave them wide berth except when sludge, some of the “mud lumps”
lurking just below the ocean’s surface were known to erupt with enough
flatulence to lift passing ships completely out of the water.” When LaSalle returned to North America after his great exploration of the river he could not find the Mississippi and ended up in Texas!
But the story of the city goes beyond the shifting flags of Spain, England, France, West Florida and the US. It is a story of creole, Indians, African, and white populations - nationalities and languages, and always it is about freedom and slavery.
There is no city more caught in the racial tensions and the idiocy of slavery than New Orleans and the fact is the city was settled more by the black than the white populations and the white population could not have prospered without the black labor and industry.
This story evolves over time and the racial mix is part of what makes this community so separate from all others, but there is a real sense of sadness in the lengthy process of equality.
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