This article is from the summer 2025 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Susan Rouillier | Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett
By the order of King Louis XIV, the heart of French Louisiana was set not on the coast but twenty-five miles upriver, along the western shore of the Mobile-Tensaw. It was a bold choice, made by the Canadian-born explorers Iberville and twenty-one-year-old Bienville. They did not want only a colony. They wanted control — over the land, over the trade, over the powerful Indian nations that roamed the territory — the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, Apalachee, Mobiliens, and Alabamas. But distance was a problem. Hauling settlers, tools, and provisions through wild country, against the river’s pull, would not be simple. The colony could not be built until a supply chain was in place.
First, they established a port on the barrier island the French called “Isle de Massacre” — later Dauphin Island. Here, the deep-drafted ships from France and the Caribbean could unload their cargo. But the Bay was shallow, treacherous. The supplies had to be reloaded onto smaller sailboats, able to navigate the shifting sandbars and hidden currents. These boats made their way to a second, secretive port — the Magazin de Roi, the King’s Warehouse — tucked into the south bank of the Dog River’s mouth where it lay hidden and easier to guard against enemies. The site was chosen with care. D’Iberville wrote: “The land here is good, elevated: the woods are mixed, pines, oaks, laurels, beeches, elms, with meadows. Up this river I am having some stave wood cut by three workmen I have here … This river goes back only 2 leagues inland, where the land looks good.” d’Iberville officially named the estuary Riviere aux Chiens, which is French for “Dog River.”
At the warehouse, goods were stored, then loaded once more into even smaller row boats. Beyond Dog River, the upper Bay was no deeper than six feet in places, a barrier to anything larger. The journey inland was slow, the river winding and unpredictable. It could take six weeks for a shipment to reach the colony. Yet without this warehouse, without this precarious system of transfers, Mobile would not have risen from the wilderness. This intricate network of trade and transport not only sustained the colony but also set the stage for deeper interactions with the land’s original inhabitants.
Ink Diplomacy: Bienville’s Tattoos
Bienville was one of the first colonists to speak Native American languages without a translator. He established trade, and against colonial social norms, he embraced aspects of their culture — particularly tattoos. Jean-Francois Bertet de la Clue Sabran, a French admiral, wrote in his journal about how the southern Native Americans “have their skins covered with figures of snakes which they make with the point of a needle. Mr. de Bienville who is the general of the country has all of his body covered in this way and when he is obliged to march to war with them. He makes himself nude like them. They like him very much, but they also fear him.” Bienville’s tattoos, which included Christian icons, and a large snake on his chest along with other wild natural designs used by natives, was both a fusion of cultural adornment and a masterstroke in crafting his message and tactics to the audience and tasks at hand.
Discovering a 300-Year-Old Warehouse
In 1988, the Alabama Department of Transportation set plans in motion to replace the aging bascule-style Dog River Bridge. But before the first pile could be driven, a discovery on the river’s south bank halted everything. The land at the river’s mouth, near where Bay Oaks now stands, was more than just marsh and shoreline — it was a site of deep historical and archaeological significance. For over two years, as the new bridge slowly took shape, University of South Alabama archaeologists Greg Spies and Michael T. Rushing unearthed layer after layer of history.
What they found stretched back to 1701 — centuries of human presence, a place where the past refused to be buried. This was no ordinary dig. This ground had once been the heartbeat of the first French colony in the Louisiana Territory, a settlement as vital to France’s ambitions in the New World as Jamestown had been to the British. Later, it became the site of the Rochon-Demouy plantations, where lives and legacies were built upon the river’s edge.
The weight of history settled into the foundations of the new bridge, tying the present to a past that might have been forgotten. The poem below by Imogen Inge Fullton, penned in 1993, was written to honor all that lay beneath the new Dog River bridge.
Now only scattered bricks are left where once a tiny fortress stood,
A Frenchman’s wood hewn citadel twixt salty marsh and piney wood.
Then, cavaliers patrolled the shore.
The King’s Wharf spanned the muddy quay.
But now, great creature-like machines efface the earth, dig to the Bay.
The dirt is heaved; a rusty sword falls, loathe to leave its resting place.
The site is razed, steel hammers pound, and concrete fills the ancient space.
Discoveries at the Archaeological Site: What Was Unearthed?
Ruins emerged from the bluff, silent and stubborn against time. Among them were the remains of frame structures within a walled post-and-plank compound. One had been a factory, its purpose clear from the traces of hardened pitch and tar in the soil. The towering pines nearby had fed its fires, their resin boiled down to coat naval wood and strengthen the rigging of ships. Another structure had been a kitchen garden, a place where herbs and vegetables grew to sustain those who lived and labored here. Artifacts, once-personal possessions, and household items included Indian pottery (some elaborately decorated), European goods such as glazed ceramics and glass trade beads of all colors, and local products such as bricks made in a kiln at the Dog River site.
King Louis’ Warehouse: Its Place in History
By 1702, the town of Mobile was taking shape. But before the first walls of Mobile were raised, before the first streets were laid, the Magazin de Roi had already stood, a silent guardian of the colony’s future. Centuries later, archaeologists traced the ruins of sandstone foundations along the Dog River bluff. The evidence pointed to Iberville’s warehouse, weathered by time but still holding its place in the story of the land.
From its earliest days, this was more than a mere warehouse, it was a self-sufficient outpost. The King’s storehouse was the beating heart, the place where supplies were kept, rations were measured, and meals were made. Just beyond its walls, men toiled over the hot fires, rendering tar and pitch for both local use and export. Even as the colony upriver at Fort Louis struggled against hunger, disease, and the unpredictable river, the LeMoyne brothers had created something remarkable. They were not just explorers or soldiers. They were businessmen, the first European entrepreneurs to carve a manufacturing outpost and a trading port into the wilderness of Mobile Bay.
“Mr. de Bienville who is the general of the country has all of his body covered in this way and when he is obliged to march to war with them. He makes himself nude like them. They like him very much, but they also fear him.”
— Jean-Francois Bertet De La Clue Sabran, French Admiral
