Expanding New France
The Lavergnes Move South To New Orleans And West To
Opelousas
by Gary
M. Lavergne
Shortly after the French founded
Quebec in 1608, their explorers and fur traders pushed westward
along the Great Lakes area. The chief activity of the
French was the fur trade conducted by the 'coureurs de bois' or
the "runners of the woods". The Governor of New France,
Louis de Baude Frontenac (1620-1698) showed a preference for fur
trading activities over the establishment of farming communities.
The expansion of New France was thus merely an attempt to
expand the scope of the lucrative fur trade and to extend French
dominance in the New World. It was Pierre Esprit Radisson
who first heard of a great river which ran southward toward the
Gulf of Mexico; within the next few years, the French had
explored the upper portions of that "great river".
Much of the early exploration
of the Great Lakes area had been undertaken by the Jesuits in the
course of their missionary work among the North American Indians.
It is a testament to their influence that the first "Mississippi"
recorded in a document was found in the diary of Father Claude
Jean Allouez (1622-1689). He and another priest set out to
explore the great river but were never to find it. Another
testament to the influence of the Jesuits in the New World was
the fact that New France's new Governor, Louis Joliet (1646-1700),
a fur trapper and experienced boatman, and Father Jacques
Marquette (1637-1675), the Jesuit successor to Father Allouez, to
explore the Mississippi River. Frontenac hoped that the
expedition would show that the Mississippi River was an artery
from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. Should the river empty
into the Pacific, a water route to the Orient would have been
found, greatly enhancing the value of Canada and French-dominated
areas of the New World.
It was in October 1672 that
Joilet and his party left Quebec to meet Marquette. By May 1673,
Joilet, Marquette, and five others set out in two canoes. The
Indians told the party bizarre stories of the river and its
environs in an attempt to discourage further explorations. It
was on June 17, 1673 that the party first saw the Mississippi
near the confluence of the Wisconsin River. They canoed
down the Mississippi to present-day Memphis, Tennessee, at the
mouth of the Arkansas River. At that location, in July 1673, the
party held a conference and concluded that the Mississippi
drained into the Gulf of Mexico, not the Pacific Ocean. Additionally,
fears of hostile Spaniards and Indians convinced the party to
turn around and head back to Canada.
in September 1673, they arrived
in present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they spent the winter.
In the Spring of 1674, Joilet returned to Quebec and reported
to Frontenac that the lower Mississippi Valley had better soil
for farming and a much milder and better climate. Marquette never
had the opportunity to report to Frontenac; he died on May 19,
1675 on his way to Canada.
It was during this time period
that Louis Lavergne, presumably having just arrived in the New
World, met and married Marie Anne Simon, the 14 year old daughter
of Huber Simon. Their marriage on May 26, 1675 was held
during a period of uncertainty and unrest for the struggling
village of Quebec. Indeed, New France lingered on the verge
of absolute disaster. As a stone mason by trade, Louis Lavergne's
services were certainly in demand, both for reasons of military
defense and civilian housing. The settlement was small
enough so that it seems certain that Louis would have known, or
at least have been familiar with, the characters involved in the location
of and subsequent exploration of the Mississippi River. Louis
and Marie Anne Simon set up house in 1675 and raised a family in
Quebec until 1687, when Louis died at the age of 40. He
left behind a 27 year old widow with six small children:
Marie Ann, age 10; Pierre, age 8; Louis, age 6; Phillippe,
age 4; Marie Angelique, age 2; and Marie Louise, age 1.
As a resident of Quebec
City, Louis Lavergne would most likely have been familiar with a
fellow resident named Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle.
La Salle arrived in New France in 1667, right about the
same time as Louis Lavergne. In 1673, Governer
Frontenac sent La Salle to France to report to French Finance
Minister Colbert on the status of New France. He returned
to Canada two years later (1675) with a grant of nobility
only to return to France (1677) with a request of the Kind for
ships and settlers for the lower Mississippi River Valley. In
order to make his case before the King, La Salle told of rich
mines and the prospect of mass conversions of Indians to
Christianity -- both sheer fabrications. By July 14, 1678,
La Salle left France and reached Quebec two months later.
La Salle made plans to explore
the lower Mississippi. His ambitions were plain enough; he
wanted to get rich. The drive to explore the lower Mississippi
was intensified by a book written by Joilet about his and
Marquette's excursion. After reading the book, La Salle
entertained dreams of an empire along the Mississippi. He
and Governor Frontenac were very good friends insofar as they
shared many of the same selfish ambitions. And, so it was with
Frontenac's support that La Salle embarked on his famous trip to
the Mississippi River.
Before embarking, La Salle
enlisted the aid of another explorer of note, Henri de Tonti.
Tonti was an Italian whose right hand had been nearly
severed by an exploding grenade during a battle against the
Spanish. Instead of waiting for medical assistance, he cut off
his own hand, which was later replaced by an iron limb. He was
commonly referred to as 'Bras-de-fer' or "Iron Hand".
La Salle and Tonti started down the Mississippi River in
early 1682 with 54 Frenchmen and Indians, including 13 women and
children. Unlike Joilet and Marquette, who suspected that
the Indians of the lower Mississippi Valley would be more
hostile, La Salle found that they were friendlier. On April
6, 1682, the party reached the "Head of Passes" or the
tip of the Mississippi Delta in present-day Plaquemines
Parish, Louisiana. They then split into three groups:
one headed by Toni, another headed by a Dautray, and the
third by La Salle himself who descended the river via the
Southwest Pass. On April 9, 1682, La Salle saw the Gulf of
Mexico and took possession of the country by erecting a
large wooden cross in the ground. On it was inscribed:
"Louis the Great, King of France and Navarre, reigns,
April 9, 1682". he claimed all lands drained by the
Mississippi River for France. (This was easily the largest
land claim in the history of the world, as the Mississippi drains
most of the North American continent). Additionally, he
named the area "Louisiane", meaning "the land of
Louis".
Upon returning to New France,
La Salle was to learn that his friend, Governor Frontenac, had been
replaced by a bitter enemy, La Barre. La Barre accused La Salle
of wanting to be King and seized several forts along the upper
Mississippi that had been under the control of La Salle. La
Salle then returned to France (1683) and appealed directly to the
King for return of the forts and for a chance to colonize
the lower Mississippi Valley. Upon returning, La Salle had
to maintain the fiction of peaceful colonization and the
necessity of offsetting the expansion of New Spain. He
embellished his falsehoods by claiming to know of Spanish silver
mines in the area and proposed an elaborate scheme of
establishing a fort about 170 miles upstream from the mouth
of the river. La Salle asked for 200 men and a year of supplies;
he got somewhat more. The King wrote to La Barre and ordered the
return of the forts to La Salle. La Salle got four
ships and 300 colonists to attempt to colonize the lower
Mississippi. They departed in 1684.
Almost from the beginning, the
voyage faced disaster. The commander of the ships,
Commander Beaujeu, was suspicious of La Salle; and from the
start, their relations were strained, at best. The attempt
to reach the Mississippi via the Gulf of Mexico failed as the
ships missed the mouth of the river and sailed instead westward
to Matagorda Bay in Texas. There, La Salle established a settlement
called Fort St. Louis. After months of hardships, the realization
that he had led many innocent people to an agonizing death
resulted in La Salle's murder at the hands of his own men. The
Spaniard later found out about La Salle's settlement and
destroyed them. And so, for the time being, both France and
Spain lay claim to Louisiana, which would belong to whomever
would settle first.
After the death of La Salle,
France seemed to forget about Louisiana; but there were leaders
from both Canada and France, who continued to call for the
immediate settlement of this lower Mississippi River Valley. The
French decision to finally move on the prospect of settling
Louisiana came about more as a perceived need to offset the
influence of the Spanish and British in the New World than a
recognition of the inherent value of Louisiana as a territorial
possession. Secret agents in the employ of King Louis XIV
discovered that the British were planning to establish a settlement
in Louisiana. The Count de Pontchartrain, an important
government official in France, realized that he had to take
immediate action. After a series of conferences with
French and Canadian leaders, two possible methods of settling
Louisiana were considered:
1. Colonists could either
be sent down the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes region
under the leadership of a man like Tonti who knew the country, or
2. They could be sent by ship directly
from France.
A concerted effort was made to
appoint an experienced naval commander with leadership qualities
to head the expedition. After considering many Frenchmen
and Canadians, Pierre le Moyn, Sieur d'Iberville was chosen.
Iberville was destined to
become the "Founder of Louisiana". He seemed to
be the ideal choice to begin the colonization of the lower
Mississippi River Valley. Born and raised in Canada,
Iberville had an active childhood. He joined the French
Navy while still a teenager and was later to become a fleet
commander, winning stunning victories over the British in Hudson
Bay and off the coast of New Foundland. The combination of
his Canadian roots, naval background, and experience with the
British made his selection obvious.
Upon arriving at Mobile Bay,
Iberville's ships anchored off Ship Island. The next day,
February 13, 1699, Iberville and his younger brother, Jean
Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur d'Bienville, rowed to the mainland and
visited the Biloxi Indians. Shortly afterwards, Iberville,
Bienville, and about 50 other men set off in two large boats and
two canoes in search of what La Salle was unable to find the
mouth of the Mississippi River. The low, marshy, irregular coast
along with unfavorable winds and thick fog and storms, made
progress northward almost insufferably slow. Late one
afternoon, the party rounded a small cape; the wind drove
them toward a series of jutting crags of land surrounding calmer
waters. On March 2, 1699, Iberville was to write:
"As I neared the rocks, I
perceived that there was a river. I passed between two of
the rocks in 12 feet of water, the sea very heavy. .....I
found the water sweet and with a very great current."
The "rocks" were
really mud-covered logs. The river was the Mississippi.
The party started up the river on the very next day. On
the fourth day, Iberville reached a village of Bayougouga Indians
who offered to guide them up the river. He was certain he
was on the Mississippi when the Bayougoulas presented him with a 14
year old letter Tonti had written to La Salle offering assistance
in establishing a colony. (La Salle had missed the
mouth of the river and was to meet his demise with his settlement
at Matagorda Bay in Texas.)
Iberville was to continue his
historic journey by travelling northward past a village of the
Mongoulacha Indians, passing the site of the present-day capitol
of Louisiana. He saw a red pole with the head of fish
and bear attached to it; he called the site "Baton Rouge"
or "red stick". After being entertained by the Indians,
the Iberville Party started back for Ship Island. Iberville
returned via Bayou Manchac, the Amite River, and Lake
Maurepas, Ponchartrain, and Borne; Bienville continued down the
Mississippi to its mouth then turned northward toward Ship and
Cat Islands. The two brothers arrived at Cat Island within
a few hours of one another.
By May 1, 1699, Iberville and
his men had completed the construction of a small fort on
the eastern side of Biloxi Bay. They called the settlement
Fort Maurepas, after the Prime Minister of France. The fort
was garrisoned by about 70 men with six months provisions. On
May 4, 1699, Iberville set sail for France to get new colonists
and additional supplies. In rediscovering the mouth of the
Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico and setting up Fort Maurepas,
Iberville sowed the seed that was to become French Louisiana.
The early years of the
Louisiana colonies were very difficult for the settlers for a number
of reasons. First, the majority of the Canadians were
'coureurs de bois' who did not like to engage in agricultural
pursuits. Secondly, most of the colonists from France
preferred to explore the region in a vain search for La Salle's
"gold and silver mines". The absence of women for
marrying and home-building also led to some discontentment.
The fact that no crops were grown during the first year
correctly suggest that the original cashe of supplies brought
over from France was being rapidly depleted. In 1702, Iberville
moved most of the settlers to Dauphin Island and shortly
afterwards built another settlement on the west side of Mobile
Bay. Iberville was to write to the French government that
there was a need for "honest tillers of the earth" not
explorers and fortune seekers. Unlike many other French
leaders, Iberville saw the need to establish agriculture as the
colony's chief means of livelihood. His service to
Louisiana was interrupted by yet another war with England, which
would require his services as a naval commander. Iberville
would later die of yellow fever in Cuba in 1706.
Louisiana was to grow slowly
and painfully under French rule. Louis Lavergne, II, the
son of Louis of Quebec, immigrated to Louisiana in the early 1700s.
The earliest confirmation of his location there is his marriage
to Elizabeth Tomelin on July 4, 1725 in New Orleans. Her
father, Pierre Tomelin was a carpenter who lived in New Orleans
on Chartres Street with a new wife and several Negro slaves.
There is evidence to suggest that Louis Lavergne, II, was a resident
of Louisiana well before his marriage to Elizabeth Tomelin, which
is to say that he probably was an actor in the very founding of
the Louisiana colony. First, Louis married Elizabeth at the age
of 44. Marriage at that age may or may not suggest that he
lived for a period of time in areas not inhabited by European or
Canadian women as the first Louisiana pioneers did. Secondly,
he is referred to in Conrad's 'Louisiana's First Families' and in
Deville's 'New Orleans French' as an inhabitant of Pascagoula
River. Unlike their parents, Louis Lavergne and Elizabeth Tomelin
were farmers. Many of the farms along the Gulf Coast in the
area now known as the Gold Coast of Mississippi and Alabama
predated the founding of New Orleans. In October 1726, he
requested Negro slaves from "The Company". The
Company was the Company of the West, a business venture of the
Royal Bank of France under the Director-Generalship of John Law,
the son of a wealthy Scottish Merchant. The fate of Louis
and Elizabeth after the request for slaves is not known. They
probably died in obscurity and were buried in the Pascagoula area
in the mid-1700s. They were parents of at least three
children, one of whom was yet another Louis Lavergne, who was to
leave the Gulf Coast area for the prairies of Southwest Louisiana.
Louis Lavergne III most likely
grew up on his parent's homestead in the Pascagoula area of
present-day Mississippi. The exact date of his birth is not
known. It was either shortly after the marriage of his
parents in 1725 or sometimes after 1732. In either case, he
was at least 20 years older than his bride, Marie Anne LaCase
when they married in circa 1777. The first written
documentation of their union is the baptismal record of their
child, Marie Eugenie, who was born on October 7, 1778. The
ecclesiastical event is part of the St. Louis Church archives in
New Orleans, establishing the presence of the Lavergnes in the
New Orleans area in 1778. The next primary document to
establish the location of the Lavergne family is the baptismal
record of another infant, Eugene, who was born October 1, 1790
and christened in Opelousas. And so, it is certain that the
family of Louis Lavergne and Marie Anne LaCase moved from the
Pascagoula area to the Opelousas area between 1778-1790.
The migration of Louis
Lavergne and Marie Anne LaCase and their family from Pascagoula
to the Opelousas area was probably prompted by the events of the
area between the time of the Seven Years War (French and Indian
War) from 1755-1763 and the American Revolution from 1776-1783.
Shortly after the Seven Years War, the Mobile area had
been ceded to the British. On that occasion, several of the
Creole families of the area migrated to a developing post at
Attakapas; but the Lavergnes were not one of them. It was a
treeless prairie that could be settled easily. Spanish
Governor Philippe Aubry encouraged migration to the area to
exploit the rich grasslands conducive to ranching. Aubry
was to write that "since the cession of Mobile, we are
entirely without cattle". The need to supply New
Orleans with meat hastened the westward migration of Creole and
Acadian families to Acadiana. Louis Lavergne, III, was
undoubtedly displaced as a result of this episode; but the
fact remains that he was still in the New Orleans area as late as
1778.
A more probable explanation of
Louis' movement to Acadiana is the American Revolution itself.
Louisiana's Spanish Governor, Bernardo de Galvez, actively
supported the American cause against the British even before
Spain formally declared war against England in May 1779. There is
no question that Louis Lavergne was a Louisiana subject who
provided patriotic support. (He is listed as such by the
Daughters of the American Revolution.) Military
confrontations between the Spanish and French against the British
along the Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast, where Louis was
reared, made life exceedingly dangerous there. Louis and Marie
LaCase were married by that tie and had at least one more
probably two infants to care for. Thus, it is more than
likely, even probable, that the young family decided to head for
the prairies of the Attakapas and the Opelousas area to take
advantage of the ease of setting up a homestead, the demand
for meat in the New Orleans market, and to avoid the ravages of
yet another war with the British.
The arrival of Louis Lavergne
and Marie LaCase to the Opelousas area began a history of
astonishing procreation. Almost all Lavergnes of the area
will trace their lineage to this single incredible couple. Some
Lavergnes, but relatively few, would leave the Opelousas area
during the next two hundred years.
(Please do not copy Mr.
Lavergne's article without his express written consent.)
The complete vitae of Gary
M. Lavergne!!!
February 15, 1999: I heard from Gary again
today with news that the entire book, Lives of Quiet Desperation
is now on-line :-) Be sure to check it out!! Lives
of Quiet Desperation: The Ancestry Of A Louisiana Frenchman!!
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