HISTORICAL  COLLECTIONS   OF  LOUISIANA.

conferred upon him. M. le Blanc, the minister of war, wrote him a letter at the same time, and couched in similar language, which so mortified him that he decided at once to write a letter to M. le duc d'Orléans, informing him that he was sensible of the honors conferred upon him, but that they could not make up for the loss of the displeasure of his prince. That the condition of the colony should not be attributed to any neglect of his, but to the want of the receipt of the necessary supplies, and to the extravagant powers granted to the board of directors.
The "Western Company recommended them to have a good understanding with M. de Vaudreuil, Governor of Canada, in regard to the wars with the Indians ; ordered that the post established by M. de Boisbriant, nine leagues above the village of the Kaskaskias, should be called Port Chartres ; that at Biloxi, Fort Louis ; that at Mobile, Fort Condé.*    On the 21st, M. de Pauger set out from Biloxi, to
* Louisiana, in 1723, was divided into nine civil and military districts, as follows, viz : 1st, the district of the Alibamons ; 2d, of Mobile; 3d, of Biloxi; 4th, of Natchez ; 5th, of New Orleans ; 6th, of Yazoo ; 7th, of Illinois ; 8th, of Arkansas ; and 9th, of Natchitoches. Each was protected by a fort, and under the jurisdiction of a commandant and judge, who administered the military and civil concerns of each.
Fort Chartkes was the head-quarters of the commandant of Upper Louisiana, and was deemed one of the strongest French posts in North America. It was erected in the vicinity of Prairie du Rocher, (in 1720,) about one mile and a half from the river bank, about twenty-fires miles below Kaskaskias. Its form was quadrilateral, with four bastions, built of stone, and well cemented with lime. Each side was three hundred and forty feet in length, the walls were three feet thick and fifteen feet high. Within the walls were spacious stone barracks, a spacious magazine, well, &c. The cornices and casements, port-holes or loops, were of solid blocks of stone. In 1770, the river broke through its banks, and in two years afterwards, two of its bastions fell into the river. It was then suffered to fall into decay, and it is now one of the most beautiful and picturesque ruins in the valley of the Mississippi.
Fort Rosalie, at the Natchez, stood on the summit of a hill about six hundred and seventy yards from the shore of the river, and about one hundred and eighty feet above the surface of the water, overlooking a beautiful champaign country, and the river for many miles both up and down. It was an irregular pentagon, without bastions, and built of thick plank. The buildings within consisted of a stone house, magazine, houses for the officers and barracks for soldiers. The ditch surrounding it was partly natural and partly artificial, and in most places nineteen feet from the bottom to the top of the , rampart. M. de Bienville named it Rosalie in honor of Madame la duchessee de Pontchartrain. By the sliding and caving in of the banks of the river, its huge bastions became nearly all destroyed, still it is one of the most interesting and picturesque spots that the traveller can visit in the delta of the Mississippi. The fort at Point Coupée was a quadrangle with four bastions, built with stockades on the west bank of the Mississippi river.
fct ra