A Wilderness So Immense (6 page)

Soon after the body of Carlos III had been taken to El Escorial, officials in Madrid began sending edicts to all the provinces of the Spanish empire. On Wednesday, December 24, they signed and sealed the dispatches to Louisiana announcing “the death of our King and Lord Carlos III (may he have Heavenly Glory)” and proclaiming the accession “of our August Monarch Carlos IV (whom God may guard).”
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These proclamations would cross the Atlantic to Havana, the administrative headquarters for the provinces of Cuba, Louisiana, and the Floridas, and then go by royal packet boat to New Orleans.

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New Orleans had been built by military engineers at the southwest end of the French fur-trading empire that had stretched in a great imperial arc along the waterways of North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. The walled cities of Quebec and New Orleans—separated by a canoe trip of thirty-two hundred miles—had been the citadels of New France.

Quebec, the northern fortress, derived its name from an Algonquian word meaning “where the river narrows.” Samuel de Champlain had founded the city as a fur-trading post on the site of an abandoned Iroquois village at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in 1608—just a year after Captain John Smith and a hundred other Englishmen had erected their wooden palisades at Jamestown and a dozen years before any European had set foot on Plymouth Rock.

From Quebec, New France had expanded ever westward in pursuit of beaver, whose fur was in high demand as the fiber of choice for the manufacture of felt, especially for hats. By midcentury, French Jesuits and
coureurs de bois
(literally “runners of the woods”) and their Native American allies had pursued beaver, souls, and glory west through the Great Lakes to the country of Wisconsin and Illinois.

In the spring of 1673, the explorer Louis Jolliet and the missionary Jacques Marquette, S.J., had paddled up the Fox River from Lake Michigan to the site of a village known long since as Portage, Wisconsin. They had lifted their canoes out of the waters of the Fox River, which drain to the Atlantic, and carried them a mile and a half over a gentle rise of land to the Wisconsin River, whose waters ultimately flow past New Orleans to the Gulf. By summer Marquette and Jolliet had descended the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas River, twenty-nine hundred miles from Quebec, where they turned back rather than risk “losing the results of this voyage … if we procedded to fling ourselves into the hands of the Spaniards who, without doubt, would at least have detained us as captives.”
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Finally an expedition led by Robert Cavelier de La Salle pushed south—through “the most beautiful country in the world, prairies, open woods of mulberry trees, vines, and fruits that we are not acquainted with”—to the Gulf of Mexico. On April 7, 1682, they reached the Head of Passes, where the Mississippi splits into three “very fine, wide, and deep” channels—the Southwest Pass, Pas a l’Outre, and South Pass—comprising the bird’s-foot delta and the mouths of the Mississippi River. On the mudflats at the edge of North America’s immense green wilderness,
La Salle and his men raised a wooden column and a cross painted with the heraldry of Bourbon France. They sang the
Te Deum
—“We praise you, O God, and acknowledge you as the Lord. The whole earth worships You, the eternal Father”—and on April 9, 1682, La Salle claimed the interior of the continent for Louis XIV and named it in his honor. By this little ceremony, in the words of historian Francis Parkman, “the vast basin of the Mississippi… passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles … all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile.”
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New Orleans commanded the single most strategic point between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains of North America: the isthmus between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain known in the eighteenth century as the Isle of Orleans. As always, the Europeans had taken their clue from the Native Americans. Here, on the east bank of the river at a tight bend ninety miles above the bird’s-foot delta and the Gulf of Mexico, the isthmus was about four to six miles wide. More significant than the distance, however, was the Indian path on the high ground of the Esplanade Ridge that linked the river with the navigable waters of Bayou St. John and Lake Pontchartrain, a shallow brackish lake half the size of Rhode Island.

Two dozen miles to the east, Lake Pontchartrain drains through the straits of the Rigolets into Lake Borgne and the Gulf of Mexico—a trade route protected by barrier islands and favored by French and Spanish mariners in the age of sail. The French built and the Spanish maintained smaller forts near the mouth of the river and along the Gulf Coast, but New Orleans occupied the uniquely strategic place where two navigable waterways from the Gulf to the Upper Mississippi converged. Adjacent to the Esplanade Ridge, the flat alluvial clay sloped gently back from the natural levee at the river. It lacked anything like the heights of Quebec, but the site yielded gracefully to the symmetrical genius of the eighteenth century. When he founded the city in 1718, the lifelong bachelor Jean Baptiste Lemoyne sieur de Bienville and his engineers laid out New Orleans in a rectangular grid: eleven blocks wide at the river, six blocks deep, giving pride of location to the church and Place d’Armes (now Jackson Square). The name Vieux Carré, as applied to the French Quarter, literally means “the old square.”

Far to the north, the seemingly impregnable fortress of Quebec stood on rocky heights high above the St. Lawrence River—a stubborn landscape that dictated the pattern of its cobblestone streets, stone houses, and granite bastions. French engineers found no similar advantages or constraints at the site of New Orleans. Louisiana had no natural stone or
gravel, but its alluvial soil offered them cypress, oak, cottonwood, and hickory in abundance. The French built Quebec of stone. They built New Orleans of earth and wood—and after the fortress city of Quebec fell to British major general James Wolfe in 1759, France quickly transferred ownership of Louisiana and its more vulnerable stick-and-mud capital to Spain.

Great Britain and her Prussian allies had been fighting France for five years in the Americas and three in Europe by 1759, when the death of his brother brought Carlos III home to Spain from the kingdom of Naples. If the balance of power in Europe was to hold, France needed Spain’s support. Although the war had not gone well for his cousin Louis XV, the turning point of the Great War for Empire and harbinger of French defeat—Wolfe’s capture of Quebec—lay six weeks in the future when Carlos III ascended the Spanish throne on August 10, 1759.

Drawn toward France by his Bourbon ancestry and his Roman Catholic faith, Carlos III still resented his humiliation by a British commander who had threatened to shell his palace in Naples in 1744. Now blood, religion, and revenge added their weight, and in August 1761 Carlos III signed the third Family Compact, secretly allying himself with Louis XV just in time for the fortunes of war to turn against the Bourbon partners. Great Britain not only held on to Gibraltar—a thorn under the Spanish saddle since 1704—but trounced the French in both hemispheres. Quebec fell in September 1759, and Britain soon controlled Canada, the French islands of the Caribbean, and all the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. And for good measure, before the fighting ended, the British navy seized the Spanish garrisons at Havana and Manila as well.

Against these grim realities, Carlos III accepted Louisiana from France in 1762. A year later, at the bargaining table in Paris, Spain was able to regain Cuba and the Philippines. Nevertheless, proud New Orleanians have long regarded the transfer of their city from France to Spain as though possession of New Orleans was suitable compensation for the Spanish loss of East and West Florida. Louisiana had been expensive for Louis XV and would cost Carlos III no less, but since he was losing the Spanish fortress at St. Augustine as well as control of the Florida coasts from Savannah to the Pearl River (now the coastal boundary between Louisiana and Mississippi), possession of the western half of the Mississippi watershed was now an important strategic burden. Carlos III demanded Louisiana from Louis XV not because he wanted New
Orleans or even the Mississippi River, and certainly not with any dream of making the indigent colony populous or profitable, but simply because it was in his dynastic and national interest to keep Great Britain’s aggressive colonists far away from the silver mines of Mexico. After losing Canada to Britain, France had scant reason to spend money on Louisiana, but whether the colony prospered or not, now more than ever its location as a buffer was strategically important to Spain.

In the eighteenth century, the bulk of the world’s silver production had shifted from Peru to Mexico. Silver production at Zacatecas in the province of New Spain, with its capital at Mexico City, had doubled under the Spanish Bourbons, and since the American Revolution it had risen steadily from 21.5 million pesos in 1777 to a high of 27 million pesos in 1804. Mexican bullion comprised half of the entire export trade of the entire Spanish empire. One fifth of all this wealth, the
quinta real,
went immediately to the crown. This income was not only essential to the Spanish economy and government; Mexican silver fueled European trade with Asia as well.
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Carlos III was well aware of these bottom-line realities. Divorced from Canada, Louisiana had lost its critical importance to France. The colony was no prize to compensate for Spanish losses in the Great War for Empire, but in the aftermath of the destruction of New France, the sparsely populated western watershed of the Mississippi River might still serve as a barrier to keep greedy Americans away from the bullion of Mexico—but only if Carlos accepted the nuisance of owning and defending New Orleans and the unexplored wilderness of Louisiana.

By 1788 there were 5,338 people living within the wooden defenses of New Orleans—earthworks surmounted by a palisade of vertical logs with four raised bastions for cannon at the corners, and a fifth battlement in the middle of the north rampart that faced toward Lake Pontchartrain. Within these walls stood a thousand houses and buildings, most of brick-between-post construction and sheathed in wood or stucco. A few boasted roof tiles or slates but most made do with wooden shingles.

According to the eyewitness whose firsthand account of the great fire of March 21, 1788, appeared in a London newspaper, Vicente José Nunez, the twenty-seven-year-old paymaster of the army, was “a zealous Catholic, who, not satisfied with worshipping God in his usual way, had a chapel or altar, erected in his house.” At midday he lit “50 or 60 wax tapers” for Good Friday, “as if his prayers could not ascend to heaven without them.” By about one-thirty his votive candles, “being left
neglected at the hour of dinner, set fire to the ceiling, from thence proceeded the destruction of the most regular, well-governed, small city in the western world.”
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Fire was a threat to cities everywhere, hut New Orleans was particularly unfortunate in the closing years of the eighteenth century. On Good Friday 1788 a great fire consumed 856 of the town’s thousand buildings, including the first
casa capitular,
or Cabildo. No sooner had New Orleans begun to rebuild than a second conflagration on December 8, 1794, destroyed 212 structures. Prominent among the buildings that survived both fires are the Old Ursuline Convent of 1734, on Chartres Street, and the Cabildo, completed in 1799. The surviving eighteenth-century structures in the French Quarter of New Orleans exhibit varied mixtures of Spanish, French, and Caribbean architectural influences.
(Courtesy Louisiana State Museum)

Núñez lived in the heart of New Orleans at 619 Chartres Street, one
block upriver from the Place d’Armes and two blocks from the levee. “The south wind was blowing violently,” according to another eyewitness, whose account was carried to Vera Cruz on a merchant ship and published in the
Gaceta de Mexico,
and the fire spread with “irresistible fury” from one wooden building to another, from one shingled roof to the next. Flames jumped narrow streets, spreading from the Núñez house in three directions away from the river. “All the prompt and opportune aid and vigilance of the authorities were useless, including the fire apparatus many of which were burnt by the heat of the flames.” They moved rapidly down Chartres and across St. Philip Street to engulf the
casa capitular,
or town hall, and the church at the Place d’Armes. Flames consumed tightly built houses along Royal and Bourbon and Dauphine Streets as the fire raced toward the city’s northern rampart and the area then known as Place de Négres and later as Congo Square. The flames blazed steadily upriver, too, destroying houses and businesses as they crossed Toulouse, St. Louis, and Conti Streets. Whenever the fire discovered a cache of gunpowder “which some citizens had cautiously hidden in their houses in violation of government orders and the most strict searches,” explosions resounded through the chaos, as though a brigand were daring onlookers to interfere. Residents found it “useless to try to save anything,” Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró reported, “because as soon as they moved things to a place which seemed safe from the flames, the fire would spread there and all would be destroyed.”