In the waning days of 1718 Pierre Duqué, Sieur de Boisbriant, arrived in the trading village of Kaskaskia as the first French commandant of the Illinois country. He was appointed to the post after the Company of the Indies received a charter for the floundering colony of Louisiana in 1717; in the colony's reorganization, the bounds of Louisiana were redefined to include the Illinois towns. Now, after a two-month voyage up the Mississippi from Mobile with a retinue of about a hundred men, Boisbriant disembarked at Kaskaskia and began to shape it to the wishes of the company and the crown. One such wish for the Illinois country was to settle habitants on the rich alluvial bottomland along the Mississippi River, where the towns of Kaskaskia and Cahokia already lay, so that it might serve as a breadbasket region for the lower settlements. To that end, Boisbriant's first priority upon his arrival was to lay a secure foundation for property ownership in the Illinois country; the creation of new seigneuries, it was hoped, would encourage the small French population already present to take up land under French auspices, and also help to attract other habitants from the agricultural settlements of Canada. Boisbriant began this process by expelling the Indians: The site of the existing town of Kaskaskia was to become a farming village on the French model, and a new Indian village was built about four miles away.