In many histories touching on the Acadians in Louisiana published since the early 1800s, examples abound of the enduring myth that Acadians arrived there in the 1750s via the Appalachian passes.  One of the first accounts of the Acadian odyssey to the lower Mississippi is that of state supreme court judge François-Xavier Martin, whose two-volume history of Louisiana was published in 1827.  Only a shadow of the actual Acadian experience in exile can be detected in Judge Martin's sweeping account:  "Thus beggared," he writes of the Acadians' dispersal, "these people were, in small numbers and at different periods, cast on the sandy shores of the southern provinces, among a people of whose language they were ignorant and who knew not theirs, whose manners and education were different from their own, whose religion they abhorred and who were rendered odious to them, as the friends and countrymen of those who had so cruelly treated them, and whom they continued as a less savage foe, than he who wields the tomahawk and the scalping knife.  It is due to the descendants of the British colonies," Judge Martin waxes on, "to say that their sires received with humanity, kindness and hospitality those who so severely smarted under the calamities of war.  In every province, the humane example of the legislature of Pennsylvania, was followed, and the colonial treasury was opened to relieve the sufferers; and private charity was not outdone by the public.  Yet, but a few accepted the profered relief and sat down on the land that was offered them."  Judge Martin's narrative, under the heading for 1756, plunges headlong into the overland myth:  "The others fled westerly," he says of the exiles, "from what appeared to them a hostile shore--wandering till they found themselves out of sight of any who spoke the English language.  They crossed the mighty spine and wintered among the Indians.  The scattered parties, thrown off on the coast of every colony from Pennsylvania to Georgia, united, and trusting themselves to the western waters, sought the land on which the spotless banner waved, and the waves of the Mississippi brought them to New Orleans."  Judge Martin then indulges in a wonderful fiction found in no contemporary record:  "The levee and square of that city presented, on their arrival, a spectacle not unlike that they offered, about a quarter century before, on the landing of the woman and children snatched from the hands of the Natchez.  Like these, the Acadians were greeted with tenderness and hospitality; every house in the city afforded a shelter to some of these unfortunate people.  Charity burst open the door of the cloister, and the nuns ministered with profusion and cheerfulness to the wants of the unprotected of their sex."  Judge Martin continues, again without having consulted a contemporary record:  "Kerlerec and Auberville allotted a tract to each family:  they were supplied with farming utensils at the king's expense, and during the first year the same rations were distributed to them out of the king's stores, as to the troops.  They settled above the German coast, on both sides of the Mississippi, and in course of time their plantations connected the latter settlement with that of Baton Rouge and Pointe Coupee.  It is, at this day, known by the appellation of the Acadian coast."  But the judge says nothing of these first arrivals settling on the prairies west of the Atchafalaya Basin.   Later in his narrative, Judge Martin adds:  "On the fall of Canada [in 1760] a number of the colonists, unwilling to live under their conquerors, sought the warm clime over which the spotless banner still waved; most of them settled in the neighbourhood of the Acadians [on the lower Mississippi].  Others of a more roving disposition crossed the lakes that separate the right bank of the Mississippi from the western prairies and began the settlements of Attakapas, Opelousas and Avoyelles."  Notice that Judge Martin says nothing of Acadians settling in the prairie districts.

Beginning in the late 1840s, not long after Judge Martin's passing, Creole historian Charles Étienne Arthur Gayarré published a history of his native state.  In a later edition of his work, for which he consulted colonial records only recently made available, Gayarré says nothing of Acadians reaching Louisiana during the 1750s, as he had in earlier editions.  He offers, instead, a more accurate account of their arrival in the colony:  "Thus, between the 1st of January and the 13th of May, 1765," Gayarré relates, "about six hundred and fifty Acadians had arrived at New Orleans, and from that town had been sent to form settlements in Attakapas and Opelousas, under the command of Andry.  In one of his despatches to his government, the Commissary Foucault observed that these settlements would, in a few years, rise to considerable importance...."  Gayarré says nothing of Acadian settlements above the German Coast in the context of the 1765 arrivals but places them there a few years later, during the early Spanish period.  Despite his careful research, however, he missed entirely the arrival of Acadians from Georgia in February 1764.

Not so the next author of a multi-volume history of Louisiana.  Alcée Fortier, professor of linguistics at Tulane University, published a two-volume history in 1904.  Like Gayarré, Professor Fortier delved deeply into the available colonial records, so only a few errors mar his account of the first Acadians to reach Louisiana:  "On April 6, 1764," Fortier relates, "D'Abbadie announced the arrival in New Orleans of four Acadian families, twenty persons.  They had come from New York."  A few pages later, the professor continues:  "On February 28, 1765, Foucault, the commissaire ordonnateur, wrote to the minister that a few days previously several Acadian families, to the number of one hundred and ninety-three persons, had come over from Santo Domingo [French St.-Domingue].  They were poor, and worthy of pity, and assistance was given to them until they could choose lands at the Opelousas and be in a condition to help themselves.  On May 4," Fortier continues, "Foucault announced the arrival of eighty more Acadians, whom he intended to send to the Attakapas; and on May 18, of forty-eight Acadian families, which he sent also to the Opelousas and the Attakapas.  On November 16, 1766, Foucault announced the arrival from Halifax[sic] of two hundred and sixteen Acadians.  Gayarré," Fortier explains, "says lands on both sides of the Mississippi, above the German Coast, were given to them, and they settled there as far as Baton Rouge and Pointe Coupée."  Like Gayarré before him, Professor Fortier, though he misidentified the origin of the 1766 arrivals, says nothing of Acadians coming to Louisiana in the 1750s.  He, in fact, notes that "Judge Martin, in his History of Louisiana, says the Acadians arrived in 1755 and received lands along the Mississippi coast.  Martin, however, gives no authority for his statement"--for the simple reason that there was none. 

Later in the twentieth-century, however, Louisiana and Canadian historians resurrected the 1750s-overland myth.  Sidney Marchand's Ascension Parish, first published in 1931, insists:  "At irregular intervals following the year 1757, a stream of the exiles continued to pour into Louisiana, until more than 4000 had taken up their abode in what is now the southern portion of the state.  An interesting group of 216, who came direct from Halifax, Nova Scotia, landed in New Orleans on Nov. 16, 1766.  They were sent to Cabahanosse ... which settlement soon became known as the Acadian Coast (Ascension and St. James)."  Oscar Winzerling, in his otherwise excellent history of the Acadian exiles of 1785, states in his conclusion to Acadian Odyssey, first published in 1955:  "The seven [ships'] expeditions [of 1785] formed but half of Acadian immigration to the state[sic] of Louisiana.  For these Acadians and those other three or four thousand who, between 1755 and 1776, filtered from the American colonies and the West Indies into Louisiana, the cruel expulsions of 1755 were gone with the clouds of the Seven Years' War."  In truth, "only" about 1,300 Acadians "filtered" in from Georgia, Halifax, Maryland, and St.-Domingue in the first decade of Acadian settlement in Louisiana.  What Winzerling's passage does reveal is the imprecision of Acadian studies as late as the mid-1950s as to the number of Acadians who came to Louisiana in the earliest years of their migration there, and, especially, the date of their first arrival.  The same holds true for Lillian C. Bourgeois's effort, entitled Cabanocey:  The History, Customs and Folklore of St. James Parish, first published in 1957 and revised as late as 1998, which places the first exiles on the river above New Orleans.  Her comments on the matter begin solidly enough:  "The story of the Acadians has been told with many variations by as many people," she acknowledges at the beginning of her chapter, "The Acadians Arrive."  "Actually no one has proved who were the first Acadians to reach Louisiana, where they settled, and whence they came," which was certainly true in the late 1950s.  She debunks the claim that 20 exiles reached Cabahannocer, now St. James, in 1755, pointing out that "Cabahannocer had not yet been founded."  Moreover, she explains, "the distance to be traveled, the rigors of winter, and the poor transportation then available would make the arrival of any deported Acadians before 1756 impossible."  She then succumbs to "the Mouton legend that the first Acadians to reach Louisiana were the Salvator Moutons and that they settled in St. James Parish in 1756.  Now in 1756," she continues, "St. James was a wilderness and any Acadians who arrived here had, of necessity, to settle near some other settler in order to survive.  One of the first, if not the first, settler in St. James was Matthias Frederick who was here as early, or earlier than, 1756.  His habitation was near Vacharie about six miles from Cabahannocer.  Early records show that the Moutons settled near Matthias Frederick in the environs of Vacherie.  Had the Moutons come with the later Acadians in 1765 [they had] it is probable that they would have settled nearer Cabahannocer [they most likely did].  They are not listed in the census of Cabahannocer of [April] 1766.  Yet they were residents of St. James; they are listed in the militia of that year; Salvador, Jean, and Louis Mouton."  Her reasoning then collapses before the mighty legend:  "This suggests that the Moutons may have arrived here before the other Acadians and settled near Matthias Frederick because Cabahannocer had not yet been founded.  The Mouton legend could be true."   A decade after the first appearance of Bourgeois's study, Bona Arsenault's History, published in 1966 in both French and English versions, continued the 1750s arrival myth, in spades.  The Canadian genealogist-turned-historian states, under the heading "Arrival of the First Acadians in Louisiana":  "It is our belief that a number of Acadians deported in 1755 to Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia most certainly succeeded in reaching Louisiana, in 1756.  For example, we know that the Acadians who disembarked in South Carolina had no trouble getting permission to leave.  Among those exiled to other American colonies, a number of them headed for the Mississippi either by sea, or by following certain rivers.  Others escaped from the transports which brought them to Virginia in the fall of 1755, and before these vessels were directed to England in the beginning of 1756.  It was to these first Acadians of Louisiana that Longfellow referred, in his Evangeline, when he wrote: 

'Past the Ohio shore and past 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;
'Men and women and children, who, guided by hope or hearsay,
'Sought for their kin and their kind among the few-acred farmers,
'On the Acadian coast, and the prairie of fair Opelousas. 
'On ward o'er sunken sands, through a wilderness sombre with forests,
'Day after day they glided down the turbulent river;
'Night after night, by their blazing fires, encamped on its borders
'Now through rushing chutes, among green islands, where plumelike
'Cotton-trees nodded their shadowy crests, they swept with the current...'" 

A wonderful tale, to be sure, but, alas, pure fiction.  Bona Arsenault continues:  "Felix Voorhies, an eminent judge of Louisiana, in Acadian Reminiscences, published at the turn of the century [1907], tells the touching story of a group of Acadians deported to Maryland in 1755 and who, a few years later, succeeded in reaching Louisiana.  This story was related to him by his grandmother, an Acadian who had been one of the exiles in that group.  Having received help and shelter from Irish families in Maryland, these Acadians acquired horses and covered wagons and courageously began the long trek west.  After crossing Virginia and the mountainous country of North Carolina, they reached the Tennessee River.  They had been on the move two months.  Learning that they could reach Louisiana more easily by riding the strong river currents, they sold the horses and wagons, felled trees and built rafts.  They floated down the Tennessee, reached the Mississippi, Bayou Plaquemine and, finally, Bayou Teche along which they settled.  This was in the region of the Attakapas post, in present-day St. Martinville.  Charles Gayarré, a Louisiana historian, wrote that Acadian refugees arrived on the Mississippi in a steady stream immediately after their deportation to the English colonies and right up until the Treaty of Paris of 1763; but, it is impossible to ascertain their number."  Arsenault evidently was referring to Gayarré's earlier work.  As explained above, Gayarré says nothing of such early arrivals in his later histories. 

Entrepreneur-turned-politician Dudley J. LeBlanc, who served in the Louisiana state senate beginning in the 1940s, perhaps was the most vociferous proponent of the 1750s-overland scenario.  "The story of the Acadians has been told often and many people have written about it, but no one actually knows when the first Acadians reached Louisiana," the Senator wrote in his history of the Acadians, first published in 1927.  Senator LeBlanc continues:  "As soon as the Acadians deported to Georgia arrived there, Governor Reynolds permitted them to leave.  The unfortunate people made crude boats, others took to the woods heading for Canada or back to Acadia, while some joined Acadians from South Carolina and traveled through the great wilderness which separated them from the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana via woods and water ways as they followed the paths of the earliest travelers down to the Mississippi River."  To buttress his assertion, Senator LeBlanc, in a later edition of his history, quotes the research notes, published in 1962, of two members of the Louisiana Genealogical and Historical Society, Mrs. Stephen Roy Campbell and Dr. Isobel French:  "'We are mainly interested in the Acadians who went to South Carolina and Georgia, as from these a small group of those who escaped were the first to travel the well-known Canadian Route through the forests and water ways on to the Mississippi River and Louisiana.'"  The two researchers cite Dr. Chapman J. Milling's study of Acadian exiles in South Carolina, first published in 1943:  "'Some made crude boats.  Others took to the woods heading for Canada, while others, joined by escaped parties of Acadians from Georgia, made their way to Louisiana.  A reference to such a party is made in an article in the South Carolina Gazette, said party leaving in May 1756.  The route from Canada to Louisiana via woods and water ways, particularly the Mississippi River, was the very first route known and used by explorers, missionaries, voyagers, coureur de bois, etc.  It required, we are told, approximately a month to travel from South Carolina to Louisiana.'"  Senator LeBlanc then asserts:  "As the wild ducks regularly came from Canada and the East to roost in an ideal pasture, at Cabahanoce (Indian name for duck's sleeping place), so came the early Acadians to find a haven of refuge on French soil which had been settled by the earliest Canadian and French pioneers at 'Les Oumas' or 'Houmas', twenty-two leagues above New Orleans.  This thinly populated area offered rich and choice lands along the Mississippi River, at a time when concessions could be had on the vast grants.  De Sennegy, whose early and authentic book on St. James is based on church archives and from family records of leading families of those days, dates the earliest Acadian arrivals in small, straggling weary groups between the year 1754-1759."  The Senator adds:  "Some Acadians seem to have come to 'Houmas' or St. James via Pointe Coupée even before the deportation of 1755.  In the registers of St. Francis Church, Pointe Coupee Acadian names appear in the entries of the early seventeen-fifties.  We find names like Hebert and Richard in the books.  This seems to confirm the tradition that some Acadians, having been able to get away from Acadia into Canada during the long tense years prior to 1755, came from there to Louisiana."

As late as 1979, one encounters passages such as this in William Faulkner Rushton's The Cajuns:  "Upon arriving in Louisiana in 1754, Salvador and Jean Diogène Mouton and their families were thrust into the company of highly advanced Indians who, as in Nova Scotia, lived near the lands the Acadians settled."  Rushton's chronology asserts:  "1754--Five Mouton brothers and one nephew begin their immigration to Louisiana, the first Cajun settlers in the state."  And, again under the heading 1754:  "April 6--The first fully documented arrival of Cajun refugees in Louisiana:  four families, totaling twenty people, who had arrived via New York."  Under the heading 1756, we find:  "Scattered Acadian refugees dumped in Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia begin heading for Louisiana."  And:  "1757--The first chapel is established at St. James Parish, soon to become the principal settlement of the Acadian Coast along Louisiana's Mississippi River."  Also:  "1761--In Louisiana, the first Cajun name appears in the cattle industry's so-called brand book:  Bernard."  And, finally, "1764--In December a boatload of 20 refugees turns up in New Orleans."  Every assertion undocumented, in a work filled with other gross inaccuracies.

By the 1980s, however, scholars such as Glenn R. Conrad and Carl A. Brasseaux of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, today's University of Louisiana at Lafayette, helped resurrect the true history of the first Acadians in Louisiana.  Brasseaux's In Search of Evangeline, published in 1988, offers a discussion of the Evangeline/Emmeline Labiche myth, which includes the improbable movement of Acadians from Maryland to Louisiana via the Appalachian passes and the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi river valleys, à la Longfellow's fictional Evangeline.  Brasseaux informs us that it was early nineteenth-century Louisiana historians François-Xavier Martin and René de Sennegy, both cited by Senator LeBlanc, who created the myth of Acadians taking an overland route to Louisiana.  He says of a later proponent of the myth:  "Like Longfellow, [Judge Felix] Voorhies depended upon his imagination for the trans-Appalachian journey, an episode for which factual information was understandably lacking, since it never took place."  Brasseaux concludes:  "The Maryland [as well as South Carolina and Georgia] Acadians knew the dangers and difficulties of overland travel and consistently traveled to Louisiana aboard chartered merchant vessels whose departures from Maryland and arrivals at New Orleans are well documented.  On the other hand, the voluminous materials relating to Acadian immigration into Louisiana fail to yield a single piece of evidence to substantiate the use of an overland route."  In an even more comprehensive work on The Founding of New Acadia, published in 1987, Brasseaux explains:  "... it is certain that the overland odyssey described in Felix Voorhies' Acadian Reminiscences has no basis in fact.  The vigilance of colonial forces ordered to fire at Acadians approaching the Appalachian frontier, the belligerence of trans-Appalachian Indian tribes both during and after the Seven Years' War, and the exiles' general ignorance of the interior routes to Louisiana militated against a transcontinental trek.  It is also certain that few, if any, Acadians reached the lower Mississippi Valley via Quebec.  Indeed, Acadian refugees in Quebec appear to have ventured no further south than Detroit, where one couple was married on January 3, 1773."301 

And so, among serious historians at least, the legend is now itself a legend.  Despite his imprecise sources and erroneous conclusions, Senator LeBlanc at least was correct about the British colony from whence the first documented Acadian exiles came.  He even deduced correctly the place where they settled after they reached Louisiana.  But he missed by many hundreds of miles the actual route they took, and the date on which they arrived he missed by many years.301a

NOTES:

301.  Quotations from Martin, F.-X., Louisiana, 1:328-29, 336; Gayarré, Louisiana, 2:121-22; Fortier, Louisiana, 1:147, 152-53; Marchand, Ascension Parish, 20; Winzerling, Acadian Odyssey, 161; Bourgeois, Cabanocey, 11-12; Arsenault, History, 191-92; LeBlanc, Acadian Miracle, 311-13, (italics added in sixth quotation); Ruston, The Cajuns, 78, 316-17, 319; Brasseaux, In Search of Evangeline, 21-23, (italics added in second quotation); Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 105.  See also William H. Adams," Martin, François Xavier," in DLB, 551-52; Brasseaux, "A New Acadia," 123-24; Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, 73, 105; Brasseaux, In Search of Evangeline, 20-21; BRDR, vols. 1b, 2; Clark, A. H., Acadia, 364, quoting J. B. Brebner's New England's Outpost, published in 1927; Dugas, "An Immigrants' Journey"; Fortier, 1:158; O. C. Guillot, "LeBlanc, Dudley J. ("Couzin Dud")," in DLB, 495-96; LeBlanc, 314-15; Oubre, Vacherie, 57, 73; Plank, Unsettled Conquest, 209n25; Book Five. 

F.-X. Martin was a native of Marseille, lived for a time in Martinique, & spent years at Newbern, NC, before emigrating to LA, where he became a judge in New Orleans.  See Adams; Dugas.  The judge's time in NC may explain his feelings toward the English colonists & the "charity" they offered the Acadian exiles in 1755.  See Book Five. 

For the Moutons actual arrival in LA, see notes 341 & 346, below.  Here's a hint:  they did not even come with the Broussard party in Feb 1765, much less with the first documented Acadian exiles who reached LA in Feb 1764. 

For Senator LeBlanc's bio, see Guillot.  The Senator lived from 1894 to 1971.  His The True Story of the Acadians was published in 1927, The Improved Version in 1932, & Acadian Miracle, quoted here, in 1966.  LeBlanc's "health" product, Hadacol, made him wealthy.  He also was a popular broadcaster & was active in the creation of CODOFIL, The Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, authorized by the state legislature in 1968.  See <https://www.crt.state.la.us/cultural-development/codofil/index>

This researcher has been unable to find Senator LeBlanc's quotation in a 1990 reprint of Milling, Exile Without End.  Perhaps the quotation was included in the original edition of 1943 but removed by the editors of the reprinted edition, used in this study. 

That Héberts & Richards appear in the Pointe Coupée church records of the 1750s does not mean that they were Acadian members of those families.  In fact, they were not.  See BRDR, vol. 1b, which covers the years 1722-69.  There are Héberts listed in this volume, but all of them are Acadians, & the sacramental records--3 marriages & a baptism--are dated 26 Sep 1767, 26 Mar 1769, & 27 Mar 1769.  See BRDR, 1b:86 (PCP-3, 236, 280; PCP-4, 20, 38-39).  The only family name close to Hébert is Erber or Herbert, & close examination shows them to be from Île de Ré, France, not Acadia.  See BRDR, 1b:86-87.  For the Richards at Pointe Coupée, see BRDR, 1b:157-59.  Only 1 Richard sacramental record is for an Acadian, a baptismal record dated 26 Mar 1769; the other 8 are for non-Acadians, & close examination of those records shows that these Richards were from France, specifically Avignon & Hannonois.  The Senator also devotes several pages to a misreading of St. James church records that mention Acadians.  See pp. 314-15, in which he insists these church records put Acadians at St. James in 1757 & 1759.  A perusal of BRDR, vol. 2, reveals no such dates for these St. James church records relating to Acadian Poiriers & Richards. 

For a critique of De Sennegy, pseudonym of Aldric Lettin de la Peychardière, see Brasseaux, In Search of Evangeline. 

Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia, published in 1987, opens chap. 5 with the confusing passage:  "Between 1757 and 1770 approximately one thousand Acadians migrated to Louisiana...."  (The number was closer to 1,300.  See Appendix.)  Where does the professor get 1757?  Which Acadians came to LA at that date?  If they did not come overland, as he later insists in his In Search of Evangeline, did they come by sea?  From where?  Who were they?  Where did they settle?  Or is this simply a misprint in an otherwise superb piece of scholarship? 

For exceptions to Brasseaux's assertion in Founding of New Acadia, 105, that "few, if any, Acadians reached the lower Mississippi Valley via Quebec," see notes 471c & 471g, below. 

Today's serious scholarship on the Acadians of LA follows the work of Brasseaux.  E.g., Oubre, 57, published in 2002:  "Possibly, a few Acadian stragglers started to reach the French settlements of colonial Louisiana within a few years of the deportations.  This has never been established as a fact, and the possibility is discounted by most researchers."  Oubre, 73, states:  "There is another historic marker across the highway [from St. James Church] stating, 'Site of First Acadian Settlers in Louisiana.  Refugees came overland 1756-57," & concludes:  "Obviously, there is no documentation that anybody came overland at that early date." 

301a.  Amazingly, the 1750s-arrival myth still finds its way into recent scholarship.  In an article published in Louisiana History during the summer of 2009, Gilbert C. Din, one of the finest historians working today, while describing the Acadian diaspora, makes the startling assertion:  "By 1759, the new arrivals were taking up residence on the Mississippi above New Orleans in an area that became the Acadian Coast."  See Din, "Empires Too Far," 274.  Five years later, Din is still writing:  "In as much as Louisiana was still French in 1759, they [the Acadians] preferred to resettle there, and Acadians began moving to the colony where local authorities assisted them in settling down."  See Din, Populating the Barrera, 4, published in 2014.  

copied here 22 Oct 2026