Ragged bands of Acadians settle in Louisiana

Part Four

by Alice Ferguson

Editors note: After their exile from Nova Scotia, the Acadians found themselves severed from their families and scattered throughout the colonies of the New World. In the decade between 1755 and 1765, many of them found their way to the bayous and swamps of south Louisiana. As recorded in Bona Arsenault's History of the Acadians, their passage was marked by New World settlers, officials and poets of the era. In Part Four of our series, we find them arriving in small groups in the Attakapas region, what is now the St. Martinville area.

In the late 1750's, there was no information superhighway; no television satellite relays, no wire transmission of photographs, no news correspondents jetting around the world to cover the day's breaking stories.

But there were stories, and none greater than the exodus of Acadian refugees travelling from Nova Scotia to Louisiana. And there were many who noticed and wrote about them, including the poet Longfellow in "Evangeline":

"Past the Ohio shore and the mouth of the Wabash,
Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi,
Floated a cumbrous boat, that was rowed by Acadian boatmen.
It was a band of exiles; a raft, as it were, from the shipwrecked
Nation, scattered along the coast, now floating together, 
Bound by the bonds of a common belief and a common misfortune..."

Many such ragged bands followed the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi river, eventually winding their way down the bayous Plaquemine and Teche. Bona Arsenault's History of the Acadians reports there was no way to count their total numbers, so fragmented was the influx.

By 1764, a year after the Treaty of Paris was signed, their arrival was old news to Louisiana officials, but no less of a concern to the colony's government:

"I am told that there are at least 4,000 who have picked Louisiana as their destiny after an erratic 10 years," wrote Louisiana military commander Charles Aubry. This unexpected event puts men in the greatest of difficulty. Nothing was foreseen to settle so many people; and the circumstances we find ourselves in are, to say the least, critical. Never was the colony so short of food as it is today. To add to the problem, they brought smallpox with them which will afflict our colony with a new plague. However, under the circumstances, it is our duty not to abandon them."

Quite a different attitude from that of the English colonial governments, which couldn't move the Acadians along fast enough. Louisiana officials, it seed, were determined to assist the refugees in whatever small way they could.

The refugees led southward by the brothers, Joseph and Alexandre Broussard dit Beausoleil, by way of the French West Indies, were among the first on record to receive such assistance, in the form of cattle donated to them by are tired French military captain. Joseph Broussard was also named "capitain commandant des Acadiens des Attakapas," Arsenault wrote.

Tragically, he did not live to see the cattle-based prosperity that was to follow for his people. Arsenault reported that, after so long a journey and so many battles, Joseph Broussard finally fell victim to one of the many plagues that swept through the camps of the Acadian refugees. He died on October 20, 1765, and was buried at what is now the site of the Town of Broussard.

The plague took others as well, as recorded in St. Martinville's parish registers: Francois Arceneaux; Augustin Bergeron; Sylvain Breaux; Alexandre Broussard, Joseph's brother; Jean Dugas; Joseph Girouard; Joseph Guillebeau. Many others had weathered a decade of homelessness, only to die in the land that their descendants late in the 20th Century would know as Acadiana.

But there were happy times as well as sad ones. Arsenault notes that St. Martinville's parish register also recorded the earliest birth of the area: Anne, daughter of Olivier and Madeleine Broussard. She was christened by a missionary, Father Jean Francois, who gave the Attakapas region a new name: la nouvelle Acadie.

Fortunately for Arsenault and other researchers, the newly settled Acadians quickly developed their early grants of cattle, and used uniquely shaped brands to distinguish their herds. The brands were preserved in a register that Arsenault called a "precious and unique record." Preserved in the archives of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, the registry included more than 28,000 different brands as well as the cattle owners' names, recorded between 1739 and 1888. In the registry's pages can be found scores of family names still flourishing in the area today.

In addition to livestock, the Acadians soon found sugar cane and sweet potatoes to be profitable cash crops, just as they are today. Even their architecture, Arsenault noted, survived not only the trek from Acadia, but the generations between the settlement of Acadiana and modern times.

The hardy determination of the refugees, who had finally found a permanent home, is apparent in the few wills and similar documents recorded in the mid to late 1760's. One such inventory, of Pierre Arceneaux's estate, totaled a value of $5,530 - a figure Arsenault described as "in the currency of that time, about ten times" the modern value of U.S. currency.

Soon the Acadians spread out across the Attakapas region, northward into the Opelousas territory. They met and coexisted with other French settlers who came, both before and after the Acadians' arrival, directly from France. The area also drew many Spanish settlers, who often joined Acadian communities and adopted their lifestyle and customs.

As of Arsenault's writing in 1978, some 800,000 souls in south Louisiana claimed the heritage of those first Acadian settlers - that's nearly half of the two million descendants of Acadia throughout the world. And, as lie notes in quoting Judge Felix Voorhies:

"We are proud now of being called Acadians, for never has there been a people more noble, more devoted to duty and more patriotic than the Acadians who became exiles, and who braved death itself, rather than renounce their faith, their king and their country."