What year did the french discover New Orleans?

Answer 1

Louid Joliet, a French-Canadian trader and explorer, and Jacques Marquette, a Catholic missionary, were the first recorded Europeans to travel the Mississippi River, in 1673. They turned back before reaching the Gulf of Mexico. Rene-Robert Cavelier Sieur de LaSalle was the first man to travel the entire length of the river. He claimed it for France.

Answer 2

French explorers, fur trappers and traders arrived in the area by the 1690s, some making settlements amid the Native American village of thatched huts along the bayou. By the end of the decade, the French made an encampment called "Port Bayou St. Jean" near the head of the bayou. They built a small fort "St. Jean" at the mouth of the bayou in 1701. These early European settlements are now within the limits of the city of New Orleans, though predating its official date of founding.

New Orleans was founded in 1718 by the French as Nouvelle-Orléans, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. The site was selected because it was relatively high ground along the flood-prone banks of the lower Mississippi, and was adjacent to the trading route and portage between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John. From its founding, the French intended it to be an important colonial city. The city was named in honor of the then Regent of France, Philip II, Duke of Orléans. The priest-chronicler Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix described it in 1721 as a place of a hundred wretched hovels in a malarious wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos, infested by serpents and alligators; he seems to have been the first, however, to predict for it an imperial future. In 1722, Nouvelle-Orléans was made the capital of French Louisiana, replacing Biloxi in that role.

Answer 3

No one "discovered" New Orleans. The Chitimacha people had inhabited the area for over 5,000 years before the French arrived. The French began to colonize around 1700.

Answer 4

The area upon which New Orleans was founded had been inhabited by the Chitimacha people for over 5,000 before any Europeans had even arrived.

Answer 5

The French discovered New Orleans in 1718 when they touched little boys.