Canal Street is to New Orleans much more than Main Street is to Buffalo, much more than Broad Street is to Philadelphia, much more than Broadway and Fifth Avenue are to New York, for Canal Street divides New Orleans as no other street divides an American city.  It divides New Orleans as the Seine divides Paris, and there is not more difference between the right bank of the Seine and the Latin Quarter than between American New Orleans and Creole New Orleans:  between the newer part of the city and the vieux carre.  The sixty squares ("islets” according to the Creole idiom, because each block was literally an islet in time of flood) which comprise the old French town established in 1718 by the Sieur de Bienville, are unlike the rest of the city not merely in architecture, but in all respects.  The street names change at Canal Street, the highways become narrower as you enter the French quarter, and the pavements are made of huge stone blocks brought over long ago as ballast in sailing ships.  Nor is the difference purely physical.  For though they will tell you that this part of the city is not so French and Spanish as it used to be, that it has run down, that large parts of it have been given over to Italians of the lower class, and to negroes, it remains not only in appearance, but in custom, thought and character, the most perfectly foreign little tract of land in the whole United States.  Long ago, under the French flag, it was a part of the Roman Catholic bishopric of Quebec; later under the Spanish flag, a part of that of Havana; and it is charming to trace in old buildings, names, and customs the signs of this blended French and Spanish ancestry.

La Salle, searching out a supposed route to China by way of the Mississippi River, seems to have perceived what the New Orleans Association of Commerce perceives to-day:  that the control of the mouth of the river ought to mean also the control of a vast part of the continent.  At all events, he took possession in 1682 in the name of the French King, calling the river St. Louis and the country Louisiana.  The latter name persisted, but La Salle himself later rechristened the river, giving it the name Colbert, thereby showing that in two attempts he could not find a name one tenth as good as that already provided by the savages.  The “St. Louis River” might, from its name, be a fair-sized stream, but “Colbert” sounds like the name of a river about twenty miles long, forty feet wide at the mouth, and five feet deep at the very middle.

La Salle intended to build a fort at a point sixty leagues above the mouth of the river, but his expedition met with disaster upon disaster, until at last he was assassinated in Texas, when setting out on foot to seek help from Canada.  In 1699 came Iberville, the Canadian, exploring the river and fixing on the site for the future city.  Iberville established settlements at old Biloxi (now Ocean Springs) and Mobile, but before he had time to make a town at New Orleans he caught yellow fever at Havana, and died there.  It therefore remained for his brother, Bienville, actually to establish the town, and New Orleans is Bienville’s city, just as Detroit is Cadillac’s, and Cleveland General Moses Cleveland’s.