Explorer: Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, 1680-1767

Americans are generally oriented toward English exploration of North America.  Men such as Sir Walter Raleigh and John Smith planted the earliest colonies.  The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.  William Penn founded Pennsylvania, and so on.  The Spanish get a mention in southwestern history but other groups such as the French, Swedish and Dutch get a merely a mention, if that.  However, it was the French who explored vast regions of what is now the interior of North America, including the Mississippi watershed and the Gulf Coast.  It was French explorers who had the earliest contact with Native tribes from these areas and described people which, in some cases, no longer have a tribal entity.

One of those early explorers was Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville.  Exploring and colonizing was something of a family business for the le Moynes.  His older brother, Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville, was an explorer, too.  The family hailed from Longueil, in Dieppe, France.  Both boys were born in what is now Montreal, New France, now Canada.  In 1699, Bienville joined d'Iberville on an expedition which charted the much of the Gulf Coast around Mobile, Alabama, including the networks of coastal islands off Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.  He established Fort Louis de la Mobile in what later became Mobile, Alabama.  He would also found Fort Rosalie in what is now Natchez, Mississippi.  And, while governor of Louisiana, he would found the city of New Orleans. 

During his term as governor beginning in 1733, Bienville inherited rising tensions with the Chickasaw.  The Chickasaw were fed up with White encroachment on their land and high-handed treatment on the part of French colonial officials and missionaries who disapproved of their Native customs and ways of life.  In 1736 and 1739, he attempted to lead two expeditions against the Chickasaw which, apartment from skirmishes, led to stalemates.  Finally, in 1739, after his last expedition failed to get beyond the planning stage, Bienville negotiated a treaty with the Chickasaw, resigned as governor and headed to Paris and a new assignment.  He would return to the Gulf Coast when hurricanes devastated the region in 1740, but returned to France and remained there.  He died in Paris in 1767.