Captain Jean Bernard Bossu, was an 18th century traveler-writer and primary source for students of French Colonial Studies of Louisiana.
What is his importance to Louisiana Creoles & scholars ?
If we worry about early writers who disliked early Louisiana and her people, as seen in the blatant prejudice of Gov. Cadillac, whose writings impugned both Bienville, our earliest ancestors and even nature’s harvest in “la louisiane,” then the reader will find quite the opposite in Bossu.
He adored the Louisiana Indians, their remarkable intelligence and often unknown culture of unselfish generosity and compassion to appreciative and to non-duplicitous strangers.
In fact, along with Gov. Jean-Batiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville, Captain Bossu was one of many Frenchmen who admired and advocated for the Amerindians of Louisiana against racial-social prejudices stoked by some who chose to ignore the duplicity, deceit and greed-driven exploitation of some Frenchmen who incurred the vengeance of these otherwise, and so-called “noble savages,” as tragically illustrated in the provocation which led to the “Natchez Massacre.”
I found Bossu’s documentation of so much that is familiar to Louisiana Creoles, in terms of flora and fauna, food and including our unique Louisiana French; itself, a patois or creole of old Colonial French married, over time, to the Mobilian Choctaw trade jargon-the common language shared by the Muskogean family of Indians of then, “lower Louisiana” which included Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas to Mississippi and Alabama to the “territory of Orleans” -our American State region of “Louisiana,” today.
The Muskogean family of Indians were peculiar to the lower gulf south, reaching and including the Pensacolas and Seminoles to the Alabamas, Creek and Mississippi Choctaw who along with the Natchez and Tunica-Biloxi, also included the Houmas, Ishak-Atakapas, Okelousas and Coushatta among others, all still with us today.
These Indians stretched also into part of Texas in their broad settlement region.