French Louisiana

French Louisiana was the vast district of New France that claimed the drainage basin of the Mississippi River. In 1682 the explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, planted a cross near the mouth of the Mississippi and claimed the whole basin for Louis XIV, naming it Louisiana. The territory stretched from the Great Lakes and the Appalachian Mountains to the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico, and was divided into Upper Louisiana, north of the Arkansas River, and Lower Louisiana. Few French settlers came; the colony depended on the fur trade, on alliances with Native American nations and on a small garrison, and its capital moved from Mobile to New Orleans in 1722. By the Treaty of Paris of 1763 France ceded the eastern part to Britain and the western part to Spain. France recovered the western half by the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800, and in 1803 Napoleon sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, ending French rule in mainland North America.