Louisiana's first permanent European settlement was not New Orleans or Baton Rouge

NATCHITOCHES, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Though some may want to get into a brawl over this factual statement, the oldest permanent European settlement in Louisiana and the entire Louisiana Purchase isn't New Orleans. It's not Baton Rouge, either. And it's undoubtedly not Kickapoo, Shongaloo, Coochie or Frogmore.

It's Natchitoches, one of the cutest cities in the entire state. And it's located in northern Louisiana.

For real.

The Natchitoches tribe and their summer village on the Red River

Natchitoches was "founded" by a French Canadian in 1714, but it wasn't founded in the way you might think. It began as a trading post in a Native American village on the Red River in northwest Louisiana. We don't even know how old the Natchitoches are because the Natchitoches tribe had no written records.

"The Natchitoches (tribe) are part of the Caddo Nation, and this was their traditional land," Jeremy McCormick told KTAL.

McCormick works for the Louisiana State Parks system, and he said that at some point in the 1600s, the Natchitoches Tribe (Caddo Nation) moved from the Red River down to Pontchartrain, primarily for trade.

"They were what is called semi-sedentary. In spring, you'd come where you could harvest. In the fall, after harvest, you'd go to your winter camp, where you had better winter resources. The Natchitoches would go from where they had their corn, beans, and squash to somewhere there was winter fishing.

It's widely believed that the name Natchitoches means "People of the Paw Paw."

And if you don't know what a paw paw is, you might want to click here.

"We don't know where their winter camp was, said McCormick.

Here's what we do know.

In 1714, when Louis Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis was passing through modern-day Northwest Louisiana on his way from Mexico to Mobile, the Natchitoches tribe either came with St. Denis "or he came with them" to the summer village located on the Red River.

Perhaps this is the route McCormick was taking from Mexico to Mobile?

"Maybe they (Natchitoches tribe) were coming back to their old village, but they came in and did repairs and fixed (the village) back up," said McCormick.

St. Denis and his men built two huts for trading goods at the Natchitoches' summer village along the Red River. Leaving behind a small detachment to guard the stores to continue trading, St. Denis later sent a small company of troops to build a garrison and outpost in 1716.

At the time, Spanish and French forces were both vying for possession of the land now considered Louisiana. (The Spanish claimed it first--but the French had other ideas about who should own it.)

The building of the French Fort, Part I

Once the new company of French arrived at the Natchitoches Tribe's summer camp, they went upriver and chopped down massive trees, cut them into enormous logs, and floated them down the Red River to where they wanted to build their new fort. (Apparently, it's much easier to float a log than to drag it.)

The illustration on the map featured in this article shows logs piled in the river in anticipation of the build.

Trade was good, and the French were able to establish links between the Native American tribes and nearby Spanish forces. St. Denis became the fort's commandant in 1722 and remained there until he died in 1744.

When the weather permits, McCormick said, "there's at least one to two of us on the grounds (of the fort) doing the living history. And we usually cook outside on Saturdays and Sundays."

McCormick is fascinated by life at the fort in the 1700s, especially what the people ate and how they cooked.

"Sometimes they'd use rye or sourgum or barley for flour. But they almost always cooked with bear grease."

McCormick told KTAL that bear oil was once one of Louisiana's major exports, which means there were lots of bears in northwest Louisiana once upon a time.

"There were lots, lots, lots, of bears," McCormick said with a laugh. "Lots. And we had buffalo clear down to Pontchartrain. We had elk, too."

Elk, you say? In northern Louisiana?

"Yes," McCormick explains. "They were here. And there's still elk in Arkansas."

There were also woodland buffalo, a little smaller than the plains buffalo.

"But our buffalo didn't migrate. They had plenty to eat here, and they had no reason to migrate. There was something to eat year-round here, so they didn't have to chase the seasons--which is what migration is--chasing the seasons," McCormick said.

Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site

Today, a replica of Fort St. Jean Baptiste has been built along the Cane River Lake, which was the Red River when the French built the fort. The "new" fort is located a few hundred yards away from its original site, but the replicas of buildings and their locations are based entirely upon Ignace François Broutin's initial plans and on research in Canada, France, and Louisiana.

Remarkable fact: Broutin also designed the oldest building remaining in New Orleans, the Ursuline Convent.

The "new" fort at Natchitoches, a replica of the one built in 1716, began construction in 1979. Techniques from the 1700s were used in the reconstruction, which required thousands of pine logs and more than a quarter of a million board feet of lumber.

But this time, they didn't float the logs down the Red River to get the building materials to the site.

Today, we know that replica as Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site, but don't go unless you're okay with falling into the wormhole of deconstructed myths related to the place where Native American, African, French, Spanish, and American heritages merge. If ever there is a place where many races met and learned to navigate across a slurry of bayous and languages, surely it is here.

McCormick is a guide at Fort St. Jean Baptiste.

"Our museum gives you a broad spectrum of everything that was going on back then," he said.

Working at the site is more than a job for this tour guide. It's clearly his passion.

"The 1700s is when all the fun stuff happened," said McCormick. "That's the age of modern innovation. You're starting to see the earliest prototypes of steam engines. Thermometers were invented, so we started getting hard numbers attributed to temperature. That's the beginning of the modern era in so many different ways. You also see the foundations of all the different regions of our country are beginning in the 1700s."

Click here to see McCormick explain how the French made outdoor clay ovens.

What happened to the original Fort St. Jean Baptiste?

When England defeated France in the French and Indian War, the country ceded its entire colony in Louisiana to Spain. Once Fort St. Jean Baptiste des Natchitoches became a Spanish fort, it remained a trade center. The fort was eventually abandoned because there was no longer a need to protect the territorial boundary between the Spanish and the French.

When the United States made the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the old French fort was in ruins. Americans found Fort St. Jean Baptiste was too far gone to be used, so they built another fort not far away.

However, the history of the oldest European settlement in the Louisiana Purchase is still critical to understanding Louisiana's history, even if the original fort is gone.

And it's worth the trip to Natchitoches.