ABSTRACT
The story of urbanizing the Mississippi Delta begins with the decision to locate a community there. Humans first settled here well before Europeans arrived; indigenous peoples camped on the natural levee now occupied by the French Quarter and altered that environment through hunting, clearing and burning vegetation, and planting crops. Large-scale landscape transformation, however, commenced with the arrival of Europeans. The French in 17th-century North America also sought riches but, invested as they were in New France, pursued a means-trade routes and empire, toward that end. Explorations of the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi region by Marquette and Joliet helped demystify the interior and refute the notion of a nearby Pacific Ocean, but no French explorer had yet confirmed the connection between the upper Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico important, because the French oversaw lucrative colonies in the adjacent Caribbean Sea.
