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It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

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Coas+VVise
Luck was with Iberville.
He not only finds one of the entrances to the Mississippi, but he has probably found the only entrance to either Fork with sufficient water for safe passage of his shallow draft vessels. He writes: "When drawing near the rocks to take shelter, I became aware that there was a river. I passed between two of the rocks, in 12 feet of water, the seas quite heavy. When I got close to the rocks, found fresh water with a very strong current, [the rocks] are drift trees covered with sediment. [They are] countless. There is only 12 to 15 feet of water where I came in, which seems to me to be one of the best passes, where the waves were breaking least.”
Iberville tells us that once in the river "the land is low and flooded, covered with reeds as thick as one's finger and 10 to 15 feet tall. Two and a half leagues above the mouth it forks into three branches.”
At the point where the mouth forks, we go ashore. One of the men tells us: “We landed and find an abundance of blackberries, nearly ripe and a few trees, of middle height. [As we ascend the River] we saw a great quantity of wild game, such as ducks, geese, snipe, teal, bustards, and other birds.”
iftarrfj 3 • 4, 1599
We travel from near what is presently Buras to near Point a la Hache. Trees begin to appear and the game includes stags, deer, and bison. Iberville tells us “I climb to the top of a nut tree as big as my. body, but saw nothing other than canes and bushes.” The marshes are endless, infinite, trembling prairies. The canebrakes are
impenetrable.
By the time Iberville reaches the present day site of New Orleans, his party has killed alligators and a bison, become reunited with the Bayogoula, and sailed along extensive swamps of ancient cypress filled with parakeets. Periodically these swamps are replaced by canebrakes. A mix of swamps and canebrakes cioak the Mississippi from below what is now New Orleans to above the village of Natchez.
When Iberville is at the site where New Orleans will be founded, he tells us that “the Indian pointed out to me the place through which the Indians make their portage to this river from the back of the bay where the ships are anchored.” This portage leads to Bayou St. John which connects to Lake Pontchartrain and hence to Mississippi Sound (and Ship Island). This connection will be the deciding factor in selecting this as the original site for New Orleans.
13, 1699
As we ascend further up the River, Iberville tells us "I found a river 200 yards wide, flowing from the west, which the Indian I have with me called the Ouacha River.”
This river, the Ouacha River, was the Left Fork of the Mississippi. Iberville did not recognize it as such at the time, probably because he mistakenly thought he had been ascending the West Fork. As he continued along the Mississippi (its East and West Forks now united into one river), Iberville continued to question the Native
Americans concerning the Hast Fork. But neither the Bayogoula (whose village he visited on March 14 near present day Bayogoula, Louisiana) or the Ouma (whom he visited on March 20 at their village in the Tunica Hills) could help him. Indeed Iberville tells us the Bayogoula “made maps for me of the whole country” without an East Fork to the north.
Iberville’s failure to identify the East and West Forks of the Mississippi would be corrected by his second trip up the River. The Ouacha River would be known to the earlv French bv a
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number of names including “the Mississippi River” and "a Branch of the Mississippi.” Eventually it would become “The fork”, then “Bayou Lafourche.” But at the time Iberville ascended the Mississippi the West Fork was as much a part of the Mississippi as the Right Fork and all the land between these two Forks was a vast island in the middle to the mouths of the Mississippi.
(Jbmiilles legaqj
In 1699 below the “baton rouge” (red stick), the Mississippi in flood spread out over the face of the land from what is now St. Bernard Parish through backwater flooding to what is now the Atchafalaya Bay. The portion of its delta which Iberville explored in search of an entrance to one of its two forks was characterized by low, inundated lands and islands which extended far out into present day Chandeleur-Breton Sounds and directly received the outflow of the Mississippi even when it wras not in flood.
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