Baton Rouge , Louisiana (LA)
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The name "Baton Rouge" means “red stick” in French. In 1699, the Sieur d’Iberville led an exploration party of about 200 French-Canadians up the Mississippi River. On March 17, on a bluff on the east (“left”) bank, they saw a cypress pole festooned with bloody animal and fish heads, which they learned was a boundary-marker between the hunting territories of two of the local Houma Indian groups. The bluff (by consensus among historians) is located on what is now the campus of Southern University, in the northern part of the city, and a commemorative sculpture by Frank Hayden has been erected nearby.
The first real settlement at the present site of Baton Rouge took place in 1718, when Bernard Diron Dartaguette received a grant from the colonial government at New Orleans. Records indicate two whites and 25 blacks (presumably slaves) resided on the concession. On New Year’s Day, of 1722, the first mass at the settlement was celebrated in Dartaguette’s parlor by Father Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix, a Jesuit teacher and missionary who was on his way to New Orleans, having traveled from Quebec by way of the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River. By 1727, however, the Dartaguette settlement had vanished; the reason for its disappearance is not known, though it probably was a combination of crop failure and the concurrent success of the settlement at Pointe Coupee, across the river and a few miles north. As the location had no particular importance to the French, they ignored it thereafter; this period of less than a decade was the sum total of Baton Rouge under French rule.
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