By 1711 Bienville saw that interaction with the Choctaw Indians through trade would be the 
answer to survival in this country.1  By 1712 most of the Louisiana inhabitants were dependent on trade for subsistence.  The colonists purchased coastal timber, sugar, and wine from the Spanish at Pensacola and by 1714 the French had built a warehouse at Natchez so they could get the skins from downriver and make it harder for English slave-raiders.2  By the day-to-day activities of hunting, trading, farming, military pursuits, and even thievery the natives, colonists, 
and slaves equally assisted the evolution to a frontier exchange economy.3  

1 Daniel H. Usner, Jr. Frontier exchange in the lower Mississippi Valley: Race relations and economic life in colonial Louisiana, 1699-1783 (1984), 6.

2 Ibid, 7-8.
3 Ibid, xiii