They came for gold mines that didn't exist. In 1721, roughly 4,000 German-speaking immigrants — from the Rhineland, Bavaria, Alsace-Lorraine, and Swiss cantons — sailed for Louisiana after John Law's Company of the West promised land filled with silver and copper. What they found was swamp. By January 1722, the survivors had been deposited on the west bank of the Mississippi, twenty-five miles above New Orleans, in three settlements they named Hoffen, Marienthal, and Augsburg. Under the leadership of Charles Frédérique d'Arensbourg, who would guide the community for fifty-five years, they did something no other colonial group in Louisiana managed: they fed the colony. By 1724, the Germans were the primary food suppliers to New Orleans, paddling pirogues loaded with vegetables and grain downriver to the city markets. The stretch of river they farmed became known as the Côte des Allemands — the German Coast. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, observers called it the best-cultivated land in the territory. The descendants spread south into what became Gretna, Harvey, and Westwego. The German names faded, absorbed into Creole culture, but the West Bank towns they built still carry the grid patterns and church-centered layouts of Rhineland villages.