I have endeavored in this book to paint the exploration, settlement, and early development of the section of our country which is tributary to the alabama-tombigbee river basin. The vast region draining to Mobile Bay shows much diversity of soil, elevation, and climate, and is not less rich historically than in natural features. For here Indians, Spaniards, French, and English have lived and ruled before the American republic was born.

And yet it is an unexhausted, in part an almost untrodden, literary field. Spain, France, and England lost the territory so long ago as to have lost likewise interest in its history. It has, too, so long been severed from the Mississippi valley, which was colonized from its shores, that the historians of modern Louisiana have known personally but little of this the original seat of that great empire, and have devoted their attention mainly to the later growth which centred on the lower Mississippi. And, on the other hand, the Americans, who made the basin and port of Mobile their own, approached from the north, where traces of earlier influence were slightest, and have now all but completely obliterated, even about Mobile, the Latin elements. An old-time local chronicler excused the meagreness of his earlier work with the remark that the French and Spanish times were hardly worthy of record, and that their land titles had only served to complicate and retard American enterprise.

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