THE WESTERN QUARTERLY REVIEW, After the first three numbers, will be published quarteryearly, in the months of October, January, April, and July;each number to contain 200 pages--or 800 yearly. The price is FOUR DOLLARS, per annum, payable half-yearly, OF THREE DOLLARS only if paid in advance. All communications for the Journal, will receive the prompt and respectful attention of the Editor. "The Western Medical & Physical Journal, - 54 Gentlemen, in any part of the United States, disposed to patronise this work, will signify their intentions as early as possi ble, by inclosing the amount of a year's subscription to the Editor, when the numbers will be regularly transmitted agreeably to directions given. A list of Agents will be published in the succoeding number. THE WESTERN MAGAZINE AND REVIEW. JUNE, 1827. HISTORY OF LOUISIANA. We have read no colonial history, which to us possessed more interest, than that of the colony of Louisiana. The French are an interesting people at home, or abroad. They are peculiarly so in the early stages of their settlements in the vast forests of the Mississippi. They showed a curious compound of their own native complaisance, insouciance, and perpetual gaiety, with the stern and silent gravity of the Indians, among whom they dwelt, and a part of whose character soon became incorporated with theirs. The French in the old world are naturally a war-like people. In the new world, although they dwelt among ferocious and bloody savages, intermarried with them, became attached to their ways, and in their turn were remarkable for the power, which they possessed, of winning their confidence and affections, and although they were either the chivalrous soldiers of Louis 14th, or descendants from them, they became a mild, timid and pastoral. race of people, the Dorians of the western world. The present creoles manifest on all occasions a sufficient amount of spirit, and become excellent soldiers, but are naturally a mild and pacific people, wonderfully fond of their paternal soil, and strongly attached. to the habits of pastoral life. A curious anecdote, illustrating the tendency of the French character to lose its natural war-like propensities in the forests of the Mississippi, occurs in the annals of their wars with the united English and Chickasaws. M de Bienville, in 1736, marched up the Mobile against them with a very considerable force. A battle was fought, and the French had the worst of the conflict. At the same time the Chickasaws had been assailed on their nothern borders by the French from the Illinois, who marched down upon them, to make a diversion in favor of M de Bienville. When the united English and Chickasaws met them, VOL. I.-No. 2. 1 they, also, were compelled to fly. It is related, as a ludicrous circumstance, that the Illinois French, when they marched upon the foe, appeared before them with wool sacks in front of their bodies, as a shield against the arrows and balls. The circumstance excited great glee among the English and Indians, who took aim at the legs of these pastoral warriors, who evinced their estimation of the value of legs, and the uselessness of wool sacks, by running at the top of their speed. * * Chateaubriand says, that when the English founded a colony the first building which they reared was a tavern, and that the first thought of the French was to construct a fort, and of the Spanish in the old time to build a church. There was a striking and manifest difference between French and Spanish policy in managing the Indians. The Spanish founded missions, and meditated to secure their co-operation and fidelity by binding them to the Spanish cause by the strong and invisible ties of religion. The French entered their wig-wams, hunted with them, wooed their wives and daughters, played the amiable among them, and began by affecting an affection for them, which they did not feel, and ended by becoming actually attached to them and their ways of life. The French and Spanish were bitter and hostile rivals for a long time on the borders of the Mississippi and its waters, and they played off these appropriate engines of their national policy with various effect upon each other. About the year 1721 the French, with their peculiar felicity at ingratiating themselves with the savages, had already secured the friendship of many nations far up the Missouri, particularly that of the powerful tribe of the Missouries, from whom the mighty river has its name. The Missouries were engaged in a war of extermination with the Pawnees a tribe, who inhabited the country still higher on the river. The policy of the Spanish of Santa Fe was to add their force to that of the Pawnees, and destroy the Missouries, the allies of the French, as a necessary preliminary to the expulsion of the French from that river, and establishing their own ascendency on it. A Spanish force marched from Santa Fe, a Spanish town on a branch of the Rio del Norte, in the remote northern interior of New Mexico, and the Spanish settlement nearest the Missouri. This force mistook its route, and instead of reaching the Pawnee towns, as they intended, and as they supposed they had done, they fell unconsciously, on the chief town of the Missouries. The mistake was difficult to rectify, for the two tribes speak precisely the same language. They communicated their purpose without any reserve, as supposing, they were unbosoming themselves to a Pawnee audience. They requested the co-operation of the Missouries to their own destruction. The crafty savages instantly penetrated the mistake of their enemies. They preserved |