no Singing Valleys 



chinked the holes in the crib with clay, put in a puncheon 

 floor, cut a window, added a chimney and set up housekeeping. 



One great service to the colonies rendered by these back- 

 woodsmen cannot be overestimated. During the French and 

 Indian wars they formed a line of defense stretching from 

 Pittsburgh down the mountains to Kentucky. The Tidewater 

 planters, who had offered tracts of valley land at low rates, 

 were not unaware of the possibility of such a service being 

 needed. 



France had been pushing down the Mississippi from the 

 Great Lakes while at the same time she extended her colonies 

 up the river from New Orleans. John Law's scheme for re- 

 plenishing France's national treasury had provided Europe 

 with its greatest bull market since the tulip craze. All sorts of 

 people, wig-makers and cooks, small-town notaries and army 

 captains, gambled in Louisiana shares on the basis of John 

 Law's advertisements that the Mississippi Valley offered a 

 wealth of food and gold to be made from foodstuffs. Rumors 

 of the prodigious yield of the Louisiana maize ran through 

 France. It was the old story of the Seven Cities of Cibola all 

 over again. 



Le Page du Pratz, who came to Louisiana in 1710 before 

 the bubble burst, tells of a shipload of eight hundred eager 

 Frenchmen, drawn by the promise of fertile land, arriving in 

 New Orleans and staring in consternation at the tangled forests 

 of liveoaks, the alligator swamps and the painted Cherokees. 

 Meanwhile, slave ships brought cargoes of blacks from the 

 Congo to work in the rice fields and indigo plantations. The 

 Frenchmen soon found a value for the small, white "homony 

 corn," which ripened quickly and gave two crops a year. The 

 Negroes grinned at sight of it. Corn was the first familiar thing 

 the poor creatures found in the land of their bondage. Their 

 tribes had grown it in West Africa since the Portuguese first 

 took it there in the early sixteenth century. They pounded the 

 kernels in a mortar to a paste which they called "cooscoosh." 



