Archaeologica.org

From today’s news page and the historical game of “What if”
http://phys.org/news/2014-10-french-shi ... texas.html

Some bad navagation and one shipwreck avoided and then maybe the North American Southwest would be speaking French instead of Spanish?

What would that cultural difference mean to today's world?
A French buffer between Spanish South America and Anglo North America?

Note that this is long before the British evacuation of the French from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi delta. That project is what accounts for the French atmosphere in New Orleans today.

What would that cultural difference mean to today's world?

It means that the redneck morons in Arizona would hate the French instead of the Spanish.

If I remember correctly, the French settlement was destroyed by a hurricane, only to be rebuilt and destroyed again by another hurricane.

Then people moved to Galveston, where a major city was built...

Of course, the real mystery is precisely what caused the formation of the Great Raft...

http://www.invasiveswatch.org/site/Grea ... story.aspx

I grew up in Jefferson, Texas, which had been a major port city before the great raft was destroyed. The level of the Big Cypress river went down and steamboats could no longer travel up that far. Jefferson, once bigger than Dallas, is now a small tourist town.

Wow, interesting!
I had never heard of the Great Raft.

Then people moved to Galveston, where a major city was built...

Great choice for avoiding hurricanes, huh?