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six months after his accession, however,
Louis was dead. The official cause was
stated as smallpox, although some contem-
poraries alluded to mental stress caused by
the deranged behavior of his young wife,
and others have attributed the collapse of
his health to overindulgence in hectic plea-
sures encouraged by bad companions.
Whatever the cause of his demise, the rapid
reign of Louis I (the only king of Spain to
have that name) was followed by the return
of Philip V to rule for another 22 years.
Louis I has been virtually forgotten, and his
name is absent from many histories of the
country over which he briefly presided.
colonial presence, and by the time New
Orleans and outlying posts were established
in the early 18th century, France had essen-
tially usurped Spain's original pretensions,
naming the territory after King Louis XIV.
A dramatic alteration in the situation
resulted from the French defeat in the
Seven Years' War and the cession of the
Louisiana territory to C
HARLES
III. At first
hesitant to take on the vast additional bur-
dens that this imperial expansion would
impose, the king finally began a tentative
process of asserting Spanish rule in the Mis-
sissippi valley and at New Orleans. The
already-flourishing gulf port proved mili-
tantly hostile to the initial arrival of Spanish
representatives, expelling Governor Anto-
nio de Ullóa in 1768. His successor, General
A
LEXANDER
O'R
EILLY
, imposed Spanish rule
with a harsh hand, and the colonial trans-
formation proceeded smoothly thereafter.
Spain proved more flexible than its new
subjects might have expected. It realized
that people of European stock, already
committed to a religious and social system
much like its own, could not be treated
with the brusque and intolerant tactics it
had employed elsewhere in the New World,
where the inhabitants had been of a differ-
ent race and culture. A rational modifica-
tion of Spanish laws on trade permitted the
mercantile population to carry on their
business much as before, while accommo-
dations were made to the presence of Brit-
ish and French traders in nearby islands.
The governors who succeeded O'Reilly gen-
erally made themselves popular with the
Creole inhabitants, although the treatment
of blacks and Indians was sometimes impru-
dently rigorous. During the final stage of
the American Revolution Spanish forces
seized a number of British posts along the
Louisiana (Luisiana)
Occupying the valley of the Mississippi
River and the lands drained by its tributar-
ies, the territory of Louisiana extended over
hundreds of thousands of square miles and
linked the interior of North America to the
Gulf of Mexico. Early Spanish expeditions
along the gulf coast established a claim to
the area around the mouth of the Missis-
sippi. None of these early voyages, includ-
ing that of P
ÁNFILO
DE
N
ARVÁEZ
, who had
been granted the land west of the F
LORIDA
peninsula, resulted in settlement. During
the later 1500s and early 1600s expeditions
marching north from Mexico and west from
what is now the southeastern United States
sought the fabled inland kingdom of Qui-
vira without success. These efforts, which
included the attempts by J
UAN
DE
O
ÑATE
,
F
RANCISCO
V
ÁZQUEZ
DE
C
ORONADO
, and
H
ERNANDO
DE
S
OTO
, were all of value only
in establishing a theoretical Spanish claim
to the region. French explorers, moving
south from their Canadian settlements in
the late 1600s, initiated a more effective
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