French Period (1699-1763)
European history of Baton Rouge dates to 1699, when French explorer Sieur d'Iberville led a party up the Mississippi River and saw a reddish cypress pole festooned with bloody animals and fish; it marked the boundary between the Houma Tribe and the Bayougoula hunting grounds. The French called the landmark tree le bâton rouge, (red stick). The Native American name for the site had been Istrouma. The French city of Baton Rouge became one of the more prominent of the few settlements of New France after permanent settlement began in 1719 with the building of a fort.
Read more about this topic: History Of Baton Rouge
Famous quotes containing the words french and/or period:
“But as some silly young men returning from France affect a broken English, to be thought perfect in the French language; so his Lordship, I think, to seem a perfect understander of the unintelligible language of the Schoolmen, pretends an ignorance of his mother-tongue. He talks here of command and counsel as if he were no Englishman, nor knew any difference between their significations.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in Richard Chevenix Trench, On the Study of Words, lecture 1 (1858)