European rivalry, settlement, and growth
The first known European explorers were Spaniards, who arrived at Mobile Bay in 1519. The main thrust of exploration came in 1540, when Hernando de Soto and his army of about 500 men entered the interior from the valley of the Tennessee River to search for gold. His expedition, which crisscrossed the area extensively, included the first European sighting of the Mississippi River and added greatly to European knowledge of southern indigenous cultures; it also opened the whole region to European settlement. A battle with the warriors of Choctaw chief Tuscaloosa, however, resulted in the slaughter of several thousand Native Americans in the area, one of the bloodiest single encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples in North America. De Soto ultimately found no gold, and the Spaniards who followed him failed to establish settlements in Alabama.
The ensuing 250 years were characterized by struggles among the French, British, and Spanish for control of the region, often in shifting alliances with the native peoples of the area. In 1702 the French founded the first permanent European settlement in Alabama, at Fort Louis, north of present-day Mobile. The British had also made a number of trips to the region from the Carolinas, but the French settlements—part of a string of forts arcing southward from Canada and designed to contain the British—were more numerous. Port Dauphin, on Dauphin Island, received the first Africans when a slave ship landed there in 1719.
The Treaty of Paris (1763) gave to Britain what was then the only settled part of Alabama, the Mobile area. In another Treaty of Paris (1783), which officially ended the American Revolution, Spain gained Mobile, and the new United States received the rest of the territory now constituting the state. Then, in 1813, the United States, claiming Mobile as a part of the