the last book I ever read (Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, excerpt one)

from The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld by Herbert Asbury:

In September 1717, John Law’s Company of the West, popularly known as the Mississippi Company, obtained, by royal grant, control of the French province of Louisiana, which comprised all the territory from the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the English settlements in the east to the dominions of Spain in the west. Into this vast area the French had penetrated only to the extent of a small settlement on the site of the present city of Mobile, another on the eastern shore of Biloxi Bay, and a third where Natchez now overlooks the Mississippi. All of these establishments had been planted between 1698 and 1716 by the Canadian explorers Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, and his brother Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the founder of New Orleans. Iberville also, in 1700, erected a blockhouse and a stockade on the Mississippi eighteen leagues from the sea, but this post was soon abandoned. As late as 1712, almost thirty-five years after La Salle had descended the river to the Gulf of Mexico and claimed Louisiana for France, there were in the entire province only eleven men not directly employed by the King. The total population was less than three hundred, including a garrison of a hundred and twenty-four soldiers and a few priests, twenty-eight women, and twenty-five children. There were also about fifty cows and a few pigs and chickens. Most of the men were adventurous voyageurs and coureurs de bois who had wandered into the province from Canada and Illinois, but the women, almost without exception, were deportees from the prisons and brothels of Paris, and the hardships of life in the wilderness had failed to work any changes in their manners and customs. When a worried priest suggested that sending away all immoral women would improve the general tone of the province, Lamothe Cadillac, who was Governor of Louisiana from 1713 to 1716, made this illuminating comment:

“If I send away all the loose females, there will be no women left here at all, and this would not suit the views of the King or the inclinations of the people.”