Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, November 25, 1997

Bouligny wanted to put the Malagueños almost in Arkansas

by Jim Bradshaw

Bouligny was born on Sept. 4, 1736, in Alicante, Spain. His family name was originally Italian, Bolognini, and not French. The family moved from Milan to Marseilles, when the name acquired its French form, before settling in Alicante. Francisco arrived in Louisiana in 1769 as the adjutant in Gov. Alejandro O'Reilly's expedition on to put down the French Rebellion against Spanish control that had begun the year before. He would stay in Louisiana six years, marrying Marie-Louise Senechal D'Auberville, the daughter of a high French official, in New Orleans in 1770. He returned to Spain in 1775, supposedly for personal reasons, but perhaps also to argue for a plan that he proposed in 1776 for the Spanish colonization of Louisiana. In his proposal, he argued that increased population would mean a more productive Louisiana.

Another year passed before the Spanish crown authorized Bernardo de Galvez, who had by then become Louisiana's governor, to promote Spanish emigration to Louisiana. The first of them, a group of Canary Islanders, was finally persuaded to come to the state, and settled at Terre-aux-Boeufs, just below New Orleans in what is now St. Bernard Parish.

In the meantime, Bouligny was recruiting emigrants in southern Spain, particularly in the port town and province of Malaga. Between July 1777 and June 1778, he persuaded 16 families, a total of 82 people, to come to Louisiana. The crown agreed to subsidize them until their first crop was harvested.

A typical contract was that made on June 4, 1778, by Luis Vidal, "native of the city of Malaga," who agreed to go to Louisiana "voluntarily without force, violence, or promise other than the share made to us in the name of His Majesty for which we will be disposed and readily go and present ourselves in this city of Malaga to embark and make the journey when the Señor Commissioner orders it."

His Majesty, according to the contract, promised to "give us comfortable lodging, build us a house, assign land to us, provide us with cattle, utensils, and implements for cultivating and labor of the lands paying us the first sowing and assisting us with everything necessary for our livelihood to the harvesting of our first crop from which time we will begin to subsist on our own contributing to Your Majesty that portion which is convenient to our situation to repay the cost of our travel and maintenance, keeping for our heirs the succession and perpetual possession of the house, lands, and live stock which will be assigned to us and all the other things we acquire in said town."

The Malagueños sailed out of Malaga sometime in early June 1778 on the brigantine San Josef. When the ship put in at Cadiz on June 13, 18 of the would-be settlers disembarked because of illness, and, after the Atlantic crossing, a few more got off the ship at Puerto Rico. Only 40 members of the original group reached New Orleans aboard the San Josef. Those who remained behind in Cadiz departed on August 13 aboard the merchant ship Princesa de Asturias and rejoined their companions in New Orleans. In total, about 60 Malagueños made it to Louisiana.

Bouligny, meanwhile, had returned to Louisiana in April 1777 as lieutenant governor of the province. He soon ran into trouble with the governor.

In 1778, Galvez placed him in charge of settling the Malagueños, but the governor and lieutenant governor had different ideas about where the settlement ought to be. Bouligny favored a spot on the Ouachita River. Galvez thought that was too far from New Orleans. He worried that the great distance from the city would mean the settlers would have little protection from Indians and that, conversely, the settlers wouldn't be able to help defend New Orleans if it came under attack by the British in West Florida. Bouligny and Galvez compromised on Bayou Teche, even though Alexandre Declouet, who was then commandant of the Attakapas District, didn't like the idea and wanted the Spanish settlers sent someplace else.

This feud was only a continuation of one that had begun almost as soon as Bouligny arrived back in the Louisiana colony. Gov. Galvez had not been involved in Bouligny's appointment, and did not like the idea of giving him much influence. Galvez purposely prevented Bouligny from assuming some of the duties of his office and worked actively to undermine him when Bouligny exercised what powers he could.

Signs of discord came to the surface in April 1778 when New Orleans was being squeezed between Great Britain and its rebellious American colonies. Bouligny, who was second in command of military forces in the colony (behind the governor), was afraid that Galvez would rashly risk a fight with the British in Louisiana. Galvez believed that Spanish forces could resist the British in guerrilla-like fighting in south Louisiana. Bouligny disagreed. He thought Louisiana's rivers, bayous, and swamplands would make fighting difficult, if not impossible.

Bouligny thus questioned Galvez' judgment, making Galvez all the more determined to remove Bouligny as lieutenant governor. In May 1778, when higher ranking officers arrived on temporary duty from Havana, Galvez used their presence to revise the military chain of command and place them temporarily above Bouligny.

The feud continued until Dec. 10, 1778, when Bouligny handed his resignation to Galvez. This apparently caught the governor unprepared, as he had not yet explained his dealings with Bouligny to higher authorities in France. Galvez, rather than accept the resignation, decided to send Bouligny to settle the immigrants from Malaga on Bayou Teche. Bouligny accepted the job and withdrew his resignation.

Bouligny, the Malagueños, some 75 black slaves, and a handful of soldiers left New Orleans in a little flotilla of flatboats in the middle of January 1779. On Feb. 7, they left the Mississippi River and entered Bayou Plaquemine. It took them four days to cross the Atchafalaya Basin. When they reached Bayou Teche, Bouligny began to look for a likely spot for his settlement. He decided upon a place in a bend in the bayou near what is now Charenton. In the neighborhood were a few French settlers and a group of Chitimacha Indians.

He wrote to his superiors on Jan. 14, 1779, telling them, "I intend if Your Lordship approves to give something to the Indian nation of Chetis Machas (sic), if I should settle on the outskirts of the huts which they have along the Teche, ... so that they will not look with sorrow before, but with pleasure to the settlement of these families on ground they occupy although useless as to cultivation and that these same Indians will provide me with the abundance necessary of game and fish ... for the maintenance of these families."

He wrote again on Feb. 18: "I have determined to settle here because it is near the exit to the sea where one can go in two days all assure me, ... it is the closest place to the cypress trees for the construction of the houses, and the goodness of the soil and of the vast pastures...."

Bouligny claimed enough land to give each farmer a parcel of 6 arpents wide facing the bayou and 40 arpents deep. He bought 32 pair of oxen, 20 cows, and 12 horses from Daleth and set the slaves to work, cutting trees and sawing the lumber needed to build houses.

All went well until April, when the spring rains began to fall and the bayou began to rise. Suddenly, Nueva Iberia was hidden under 6 feet of water. Bouligny and his settlers decided to move to higher ground.

They headed upstream, reaching another bend in the bayou about 20 miles above their first settlement. There was a slight bluff here, higher than the land around it, and Bouligny decided that this would be the place for his second attempt at town building. Unfortunately, another settler, François Prevost, had already found the land and received a grant for it.

Bouligny paid Prevost 400 pesos for a piece of bayou-front land 8 arpents wide and 30 arpents deep, a part of which is now Bouligny Plaza in downtown New Iberia.

Nine more Malagueños moved to the second Nueva Iberia in June. In July, some local Acadians were hired to help build houses. The settlers' homes were all 15-by-28-feet and were raised 9 feet off the ground, in case the bayou should flood there also.

In August, just as construction was well under way, Bouligny received word that Spain had allied itself with the fledgling American nation in its battle for independence and had declared war upon Great Britain. As a lieutenant colonel in the Spanish army, Bouligny immediately offered his services to the governor, along with that of 15 Malagueños, 5 soldiers, 2 deserters, 3 or 4 Germans, and 25 of the youngest slaves. He notified Gov. Galvez that unless he received instructions to the contrary, he intended to go with his men to where he could be useful in defending the Spanish territory from British attack from West Florida. No contrary orders arrived because Galvez was then in the midst of planning his campaign to seize the British posts at Manchac, Baton Rouge, and Natchez.

Sometime before the end of August, Bouligny left New Iberia with his band of soldiers and slaves. He would never return to New Iberia, even though he continued to live in Louisiana until his death in November 1800. When the war ended and the Nueva Iberia settlement got a harder look from the governor, Galvez decided that Bouligny had spent too much money to settle the place. Only 40,000 pesos had been budgeted for the settlement. Bouligny had spent 31,150 of them. Galvez put Nicholas Forestall in charge, and told him to watch his pesos better than Bouligny had.

Before leaving the New Iberia settlement, Bouligny reported that the Malagueños had planted 75 arpents of corn at the new site and 35 at the old site. They had also cultivated 25 arpents of rice, six of potatoes, and a small plot of tobacco. Several homes had been constructed, as well as a building in which they made bricks and lime.

The New Iberia settlement struggled for a while. It had been planned that the Malagueños would grow wheat, barley, flax, and hemp -- crops not suited for south Louisiana. They would eventually figure this out, and turn to raising cattle. The settlement was also too small for their numbers. Some of them moved to new land grants on Lac Flamand, which became Spanish Lake after their settlement on its shores. By 1793, only five or six of the original Spanish families remained in New Iberia.

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