Brief History of Louisiana Flags
1519 Alonso Alvarez de Pineda led an expedition along the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico and discovered the mouth of a great river which may have been the Mississippi.
Spanish Flag of Leone & Castile
1542 The Spanish adventurer Hernando de Soto died on the shores of the Mississippi River near present-day Memphis while exploring the southeastern United States. Each year the Mississippi, an Ojibwa Indian word meaning "big river" carries 400,000,000 tons of sediment into the Gulf of Mexico and discharges more water than all European rivers combined.
1682 The French explorer Sieur de La Salle, the first to descend the Mississippi to its mouth, took possession "of the country known as Louisiana," and named it for the reigning monarch of France, Louis XIV.
1714 Louis Juchereau de St. Denis founded Fort St. Jean Baptiste, present-day Natchitoches, the first permanent settlement in Louisiana.
1718 Sieur de Bienville began building New Orleans as a company town for the Company of the West. By 1721 New Orleans had a population of more than 370 people, including 147 male colonists, 65 female colonists, 38 children, 28 servants, 73 slaves and 21 Indians.
1762 By the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, France ceded its unprofitable and remote territories west of the Mississippi and the Isle of Orleans to Spain. It was 23 months later before the colonists in Louisiana learned they were no longer French subjects.
William Charles Cole Claiborne was appointed governor of the Territory
of Orleans, which the area of present-day Louisiana was called. Before
then he was governor of Mississippi Territory and the lone representative
in Congress of Tennessee. Claiborne was selected as one of the commissioners
to receive the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. In 1812 Claiborne
was elected the state's first governor, a position he held until 1816 when
he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He died in 1817.
Louisiana formally became the 18th state to join the union. William Charles
Cole Claiborne was elected its first governor. The New Orleans, the first
steamboat to navigate the Mississippi, arrived at New Orleans from Pittsburgh
beginning the golden era of the steamboat.
The capital was transferred to Baton Rouge from New Orleans where a new
statehouse was waiting. Built at a cost of $100,000, the American gothic
design of the building was very much in vogue. Mark Twain said about the
building, "...this little sham castle ... this architectural falsehood
... this whitewashed castle with turrets and things would never been built
in this otherwise honorable place had it not been for the medieval romances
of Sir Walter Scott."
Black Lieutenant Governor P.B.S. Pinchback served briefly as Louisiana's
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