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the survivors, and they settled on the banks of the Mississippi, about twenty-five miles upriver of New Orleans.
    Map of the settlement of the German Coast around Louisiana. By Hanno Delier, 1909. (Courtesy the University of Pennsylvania)
    Meanwhile, an earlier group of Germans who had settled on the Arkansas River in 1720 had been too ill and too busy providing shelter to have produced a crop by 1721. No financial help came from bankrupt John Law. So, in January 1722, they abandoned their concession and descended upon New Orleans, where they demanded passage to Europe. Bienville tried to induce them to remain. They were given rich lands near the “D’Arensbourg Germans” in the area that is today called the German Coast (the parishes of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist).
    Hanno Delier tells us that these “Arkansas Germans,” on their descent to New Orleans, must have met their fellow countrymen, the D’Arensbourg Germans, who had just settled there. This was undoubtedly a determining factor in their decision to accept Bienville’s offer of the land in the area. The descendants of those early settlers still live in the area first called “La Côte des Allemands,” and later “Des Allemands.” These early German settlers brought much stability to the colony with their successful farming and were better able to endure the climate than the French.
    There was a shortage of unmarried women in the colony, and the men were forced to take Indian squaws as brides.
    “Send me wives for my Canadians,” Bienville wrote to Paris. “They are running in the woods after Indian girls.” In 1721, eighty-eight girls from a house of correction in Paris, La Salpêtrière, arrived in the city under the care of three Gray Sisters and a midwife, who was nicknamed La Sans Regret.
    Within a month, nineteen had married and ten died, leaving fifty-nine to be cared for, which was not an easy task, as they were girls who “could not be restrained.” They are to be distinguished from the Casket Girls, who did not arrive until 1728. The latter came to Mobile and Biloxi to be wives to the settlers. They were from good middle class families, and they were skilled in housewifely duties and excellent of character. The Ursuline nuns claim that there is no historical basis for the story that they came to New Orleans.
    Some of the concessionaires that came to work their own land are worthy of mention.
    The Marquis de Mezières from Amiens, France, built his home in 1720 at the present site of the Petite Salon on St. Peter Street.
    Claude-Joseph Dubreuil de Villars and his family arrived in New Biloxi in 1721. He later settled in the Tchoupitoulas, near the location of the present Ochsner Hospital. There, with his family and ten servants, he grew rice and indigo. By 1724, he had an avenue of trees and, by 1725, two indigo factories, which produced ink and dye. He became contractor for the Mississippi Valley. He built the first levee in New Orleans and a canal between the Mississippi River and Bayou Barataria, the location of the present day Harvey Canal.
    Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, (1695-1775), was born in Holland and came to Dauphin Island in 1718, after having served with the French army in Germany. In his three-volume work, Histoire de la Louisiane, he tells of settling a plantation on Bayou St. John , then moving on to the Natchez country, where he spent eight years. He wrote of their lives and customs, leaving the most accurate account we have of these original inhabitants of Louisiana. After sixteen years in America, during which time he served as manager of the Company of the Indies and manager of the King’s Farm, which dealt in slave trade at Algiers Point, he returned to France where his books were published in 1758. They were, and still are, a treasure-trove of early Louisiana history.
    Antoine Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, born at Fort Louis de la Mobile in 1772, was the stepson of Ignace Broutin, the royal engineer. He