The pilots were critical to helping ships navigate to and from the port of New Orleans through the shifting passages, currents, and sandbars of the river's delta front.

By 1853 also called Pilotsville, the village of La Balize was rebuilt about five miles (8 km) to the northwest in the Southwest Pass, on the west bank of the Mississippi.

[3] La Balize was abandoned, and a new pilots' settlement was constructed about five miles (8 km) upriver on the east bank of the Mississippi, just above the Head of the Passes.

When the explorer Robert de La Salle claimed the land in 1682 for the French crown, he identified this site near the mouth of the Mississippi as important.

[5] After the establishment of La Balize, the King commissioned Nicolas Godefroy Barbin to serve as the "Garde Magazin" (chief administrator) there.

That commission, signed in 1703 by the King and his minister Jérôme Phélypeaux comte de Pontchartrain, was significant in that it recognized the strategic importance of La Balize.

[6] Despite the vulnerability of the low-lying site to hurricanes, the French and later the Spanish needed to control the mouth of the Mississippi and have a place where pilots could meet the ships.

Historical records for La Balize documented the long struggle of the French, Spanish and Americans to maintain this critical site at the delta front: The hurricanes of 1860 persuaded the pilots and their families to rebuild further upriver, which they did about five miles (8 km) away, on the east bank of the Mississippi.

One only object rears itself above the eddying waters; this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the bar, and it still stands, a dismal witness of the destruction that has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.

The narrow strip of earth where the houses are grouped is at the same time the shore of the river and that of the sea; the salty waves and the swells of freshwater cover it in turn and meet each other there in a labyrinth of ditches filled with a viscous and corrupted mixture; everywhere a bulge of the spongy earth allows plants to attach their roots, wild canes and reeds grow there in impenetrable thickets.

Also, when the storm wind blows and the waves of the sea come one after another tumbling into the river over the offshore bar, the houses of la Balize could well be swept away if they were not moored like ships; sometimes even the village comes to drag on its anchors.