Slavery in the colonial United States in the Caribbean: Guadeloupe and especially Saint-Domingue.) After the port of New Orleans was founded in 1718 with access to the Gulf Coast, French colonists imported more African slaves to the Illinois Country for use as agricultural or mining laborers. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves accounted for as many as a third of the limited population in that rural area. Slavery was much more extensive in colonial Louisiana, where the French developed sugar cane plantations along the Mississippi river. Slavery was maintained during the French (1699 – 1763, and 1800 – 1803) and Spanish (1763 – 1800) periods of government.
French people in Nebraska as present-day Illinois. Trappers and traders established relationships with Native American tribes at major points around the Great Lakes and along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. In the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762, France ceded its lands west of the Mississippi River to Spain. In 1794 a French trapper named Jean-Baptiste Truteau established a trading post 30 miles up the Niobrara River. The next year, in 1795, Jacques D'Eglise traveled the Missouri River Valley on behalf of the Spanish crown. Searching for the elusive Northwest Passage, D'Eglise did not go any further than central North Dakota. In 1803 the United