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jT- 000^5	french	ikkt~rants	dominated trade
DURING PIONEER DAYS OF LOUISIANA
—	STEAM POWER INTRODUCED NORTH AMERICANS — BARGES FLAT BOTTOMED BEST BOATS FOR BAYOUS l8Ht - 1826
The Environs of New Orleans Trade and Industry Resumed in 1816
Throngs of busy Frenchmen ebbed and flowed in the hotel or restaurant called "Le Veau Qut Teten and were then mostly engaged in active business pursuits in New Orleans immediately after the resumption of trade and industry in 1816.
Under the government of O'Reilly in 1770, a number of French inhabitants had been exiled to the near island of Havana, from which several of these same exiled patriots afterwards sought a refuge in Hispaniola or St. Domingo. Among the same mass of active members of society there beheld by us, and who were then pursuing the identical career as their former commercial compatriots, we often were reminded by their appellations, their names, manners and physiognomies, of those former Frenchmen, the first colonists, who had given the starting impulse to New Orleans commerce and enterprise.
French Immigrants had Starrted Trading Posts
Aye, in those times it was not the North American adventurers that served as pioneers in the commercial establishments throughout our State, but this was the especial branch of foreign French immigrants, who were indeed most indefatigable in forming mercantile posts and agencies over all the rural campaigns of lower Louisiana, in the nooks and corners of the most inland bayous and far away stretching pine-wood ridges.
Much later, when steam power had opened a way for more active operations on the inland water courses and the great tributary streams of the Mississippi, North American traders and merchants began to establish their branches and agencies throughout the country.
But, at the time mentioned—in 1816—the country trade, with few exceptions, was mostly in the hands of an active class of European French, for the natives of the country had addicted themselves almost exclusively to the culture of the soil, and on large or small farms, or plantations, would occupy themselves with these branches of social industry, leaving commerce and trade mostly in the hands of the t new-coming immigrants, often sportively called "les nouveaux -deballes"—that is, "the newly unbaled ones," or those just taken out of the imported bales and boxes.