Commerce Between the Indians of Mexico and the French at the Port of Mississippi

François-Gérard Jollain (French, ca. 1660–after 1723)

ca. 1719

Evidently at the request of Indies Company backers, the engraver François-Gérard Jollain produced a poster-sized print advertising life in the new capital of Louisiana, built along the Mississippi River. As shown in this reproduced engraving, Jollain imagines New Orleans to be a welcoming tropical paradise. French settlers are shown drinking wine with Indigenous inhabitants and converting them to Christianity. At right, a pile of dead game, along with the arrival of a woman bearing textiles, allude to warm commercial relations. The lengthy text below the image informs potential settlers that natural bounty and mountain-strewn mineral riches await. In reality, the colony was a mountainless swamp whose sparse population depended on food shipments from France. Nonetheless, the print registers the extent to which French settlers relied on Native American polities such as the Biloxi tribe, who had steered them to New Orleans two decades earlier.