Pelican Girls

10/01/2026

In 1699, French explorers reached a barrier island off the Alabama coast and discovered a startling sight — roughly 60 human skeletons. 💀🏝️

Believing they had found evidence of a massacre, the French began calling the place Île du Massacre — Massacre Island. The island soon became an important port and supply point for France's young Louisiana colony.

But the gruesome discovery left behind a mystery. The island had been used by Native Americans long before the French arrived, and archaeological evidence of that history remains there today. What exactly accounted for the bones the French encountered is less certain than the old “Massacre Island” story makes it sound.

Around 1711, the French renamed the island Île Dauphine, honoring Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, Dauphine of France. Eventually, it became the Dauphin Island we know today.

Did you know Dauphin Island was once called Massacre Island?

10/01/2026

There's a star-shaped brick fort at the mouth of Mobile Bay that took 15 years to build, and enslaved masons built most of it. 🧱

Fort Morgan sits on Mobile Point, at the western end of Highway 180. Construction started in 1819 but the site was so isolated that it wasn't finished until 1834, using more than 46 million bricks. Before Fort Morgan existed, an earlier post called Fort Bowyer stood on the same spot and was attacked twice during the War of 1812. Confederate troops seized Fort Morgan in early 1861, and it stayed in Confederate hands until it surrendered after a two-week siege in August 1864. It later served through the Spanish-American War and both World Wars before becoming the historic site it is today.

Have you ever walked through the casemates at Fort Morgan?

09/27/2026

During her sojourn at Mobile Bay, the Pélican had brought both good fortune and catastrophe to Louisiana. While calamity outweighed benefit as far as the Tomeh, Talimali and other victims of the scourge were concerned, the same could not be said for the colony as a whole. As valuable as had been the lives and services of Tonti, Levasseur and the some forty-odd other casualties of the epidemic (excluding natives), the far-reaching effects of the young girls’ entrance into the colony would be incalculable.

Higginbotham, Jay. Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711 (Library of Alabama Classics) (p. 201). (Function). Kindle Edition.

09/27/2026

Toward the first week in October, the Pélican finally managed to depart from Massacre Island. Ducoudray weighed anchor and sailed toward Havana where Father Dongé died either shortly before or after the ship’s layover in the Spanish port.

Higginbotham, Jay. Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711 (Library of Alabama Classics) (p. 201). (Function). Kindle Edition.

09/25/2026

By the end of September yellow fever had taken fully half of Bienville's officers.

Additionally, two of the girls that had escaped illness in Cuba had succombed at Fort Louis. Catherine Tournant and Jeanne-Élisabeth Le Pinteaux joined the rapidly growing burial ground just outside of town.

09/10/2026

Dunno about the being taught how to cook part, but the rest is pretty spot on!

Everybody in Louisiana has heard of the casket girls. Almost nobody has heard of the twenty three women who came first, seventeen years earlier, and had a far worse time of it.

In 1704 the French colony of Louisiana was a handful of soldiers and traders at Fort Louis on the Mobile River, and Bienville was writing home that his men were deserting into the woods to live with Native families because there were no French women in the colony. Paris responded by recruiting. The ship Pelican sailed with twenty three young women, most of them poor, most from around Paris, all vouched for by their parish priests as being of good character. They were promised husbands, land and a future. ⛵

They got yellow fever. The Pelican stopped at Havana on the way and the sickness came aboard with the water. By the time they reached the Gulf coast people were dying, and the epidemic that came ashore with the ship killed a large share of the tiny colony, including some of the women themselves.

The survivors married within weeks, because that was the arrangement. And then they discovered what nobody in Paris had mentioned. There was no wheat. There was no bread. The colony ate corn, and the women had never cooked with it and considered it food for animals. Their protest became known in the records as the Petticoat Insurrection, and it was serious enough that Bienville had to bring in a Native woman to teach them how to cook what the country actually grew.

Think about that. The first French households in Louisiana were kept alive because an Indigenous woman was willing to walk into somebody's kitchen and start over from the beginning.

Those twenty three names sit at the root of an enormous number of Gulf Coast family trees. They were not romantic figures. They were young, broke, seasick, grieving and stubborn, and they stayed. 🌾

09/10/2026

Even as Tonti was being interred his fellow officer and neighbor, Charles Levasseur, dit Ruessavel, lay near death. Levasseur, named Charles by his godfather Charles Aubert de La Chesnaye (an ally of Bienville’s father and perhaps the most powerful businessman in seventeenth century New France), had, like Tonti, been a member of La Salle’s epic exploration of the Mississippi, had been instrumental in the founding of Mobile. It was Levasseur who had first explored the Mobile River basin for France, who had helped gain the friendship of the local Indians, who had, in 1700, planted the cross at the base of the river (now the present site of Mobile). Also, like Tonti, he had been engaged to one of the young girls whom he was now leaving unestablished.

The map below as drawn by him laying out the town.

Higginbotham, Jay. Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711 (Library of Alabama Classics) (p. 196). (Function). Kindle Edition.

09/10/2026

Henri de Tonti had been sick now for nearly two weeks, having come down with the fever during the third week in August. By the third of September, he began to expel the black vomit, which was characteristic of the disease in its most severe stage, and his neighbors on the rue de Tonti, Canadian Antoine Roussin and surgeon Pierre Clavery, were beginning to prepare themselves for the inevitable. It would be a heavy loss for the colony, not only for the young girl to whom Tonti was betrothed (who now must face the prospect of finding another husband) but also for the seminary priests who, in Tonti, had found a measure of sympathy they would fail to find in the other officers of the garrison.

Higginbotham, Jay. Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711 (Library of Alabama Classics) (p. 195). (Function). Kindle Edition.

09/01/2026

08/30/2026

👻Spooky Season is upon us!!! 🎃 Make plans to attend our Halloween Bash October 30, 2026!
👉Touch and hold the QR code until a menu pops open, so you can go straight to the Google Payable Form to purchase tickets, reserve a table to decorate, and enter the food contest!
We can’t wait to see you there!
📲Android users, please see pic in comments to assist with QR code.
🔗Link in comments