In this Paris of prolific promotion and amazed credulity, ripe for the colossal scheme of Law, soon to blow to bursting-point the bubble of the Mississippi, the very songs in the street echoed flamboyant, half-satiric panegyrics upon the new Utopia, this Mississippi Land of Cockayne: It's to-day no contribution To discuss the Constitution And the Spanish war's forgot For a new Utopian spot; And the very latest phase Is the Mississippi craze.
Interest in the new colony led to a great development of southwesterly trade from New France.

Already the French coureurs de bois were following the water route from the Illinois to South Carolina.

Jean Couture, a deserter from the service in New France, journeyed over the Ohio and Tennessee rivers to that colony, and was known as "the greatest Trader and Traveller amongst the Indians for more than Twenty years." In 1714 young Charles Charleville accompanied an old trader from Crozat's colony on the gulf to the great salt-springs on the Cumberland, where a post for trading with the Shawanoes had already been established by the French.

But the British were preparing to capture this trade as early as 1694, when Tonti warned Villermont that Carolinians were already established on a branch of the Ohio.

Four years later, Nicholson, Governor of Maryland, was urging trade with the Indians of the interior in the effort to displace the French.