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Tonti came down the Mississippi from Illinois in 1689 and did his level best to find and rescue La Salle but found no trace of him. He did not look for him in Texas but it would have accomplished nothing if he had. He left, with the Indians, a letter for La Salle and returned to Illinois.
Ten more years passed. Fifteen since La Salle had left France.
On October 24, 1698, Iberville sailed from Breste on the same mission, to find the mouth of the Mississippi via the Gulf of Mexico.
He first set foot on the main land on the west shore of Mobile Bay. He explored the bay and the islands and found a fine harbor at one of them which he named Isle au Vesseau, or Ship Island, which is nine miles south of what was to become Biloxi. But the exposed nature of the situation decided him to seek a better location. When the back bay was discovered, with its protection to shipping and concealment from view, he made his settlement there.
In all that vast tract of land, the watershed of the Mississippi River, extending from Pennsylvania in the east to Oregon in the west and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, the first site selected for settlement by the French owners was Biloxi.
Iberville named his settlement for the Biloxi Indians who were the first people he met there.
On April 8, 1699, he began the erection of a wooden fort which he named Fort Maurepas. This was on the east side of the bay.
The approximate location in later days was called Le Vieux Fort, Lynchburg, and now Ocean Springs.
Iberville installed Sauvole as Governor and Bienville as Lieutenant. Sauvole died August 22, 1701, and was buried in his capital. Thereupon Bienville assumed the responsibilities of Governor. His official appointment was received seventeen years later, in 1718.
Louis XIV, by marrying a daughter of Philip IV of Spain and thus forming a close alliance of the two powers, had aroused the resentment of Europe against France and Spain. France, anticipating an attack on the province by the English, who might also attack the Spanish at Pensacola, ordered the removal of its forces from Biloxi to a location nearer to the allied forts of Spain at Pensacola, for mutual protection. The Spanish, however, were as apprehensive of their French allies as they were of having to cope with the English single handed.
Bienville selected a site on a bluff twenty-seven miles up the Mobile River—the direction from which the English were expected—while his brother Iberville lay ill in a hospital at Pensacola. He had just returned from France. On January 17, 1702, the erection of Fort Louis began and the first white family arrived March 19.