Deshotels is another French surname that was brought to Louisiana from Canada in the mid-eighteenth century, eventually taking root chiefly in old St. Landry Parish.

In the early 1750s Jacques Deshotels (Desautels) dit LaPointe, the younger son of a large Montreal family, and a voyageur or trader, arrived in Pointe Coupee.* There he continued his trading enterprise, principally with Indians, and after purchasing land probably near Old River in the northern part of the Pointe Coupee area, he settled down to become a prosperous planter (with 19 slaves in 1766); before his death in 1771 he had obtained other properties in Pointe Coupee and even a sizable vacherie, or cattle ranch, in the Grande Prairie district north of Opelousas Post.

Married to Anne Stephan de Roquancourt in 1755,4 he became the progenitor of perhaps all the Deshotels families of Louisiana.

In the late 1780s and early 1790s Jacques Deshotels' three sons and their families departed their Pointe Coupee homeland to settle elsewhere, Jacques, Jr., and Nicolas going westward to the Opelousas prairies, and Jacques-Antoine to the Avoyelles and Rapides districts to the north.

Although Jacques, Jr. (m. 1779 Félicité Fontenot) may have lived for a time in the Avoyelles area, he and his family eventually settled along Bayou Plaquemine Brulée west of Opelousas Post;6 judging from church records, during most of the nineteenth century the greater part of his descendants appear to have remained in the areas around Chataignier, Mamou, Ville Platte, and Eunice.

By 1788, Nicolas Deshotels (m. 1778 Marie-Anne Brezat) had settled his family probably on Bayou Cocodrie, near his father's former cattle ranch in the Grande Prairie area.

Although blind from birth, Nicolas became a successful farmer-stockman in the area and produced a family of twelve children, including five sons, four of whom in turn begat a large number of progeny.

By the 1870s the descendants of Nicolas on the male side far outnumbered those of his brother Jacques, Jr. Church records suggest that many remained in the Grande Prairie area, but that others migrated westward to join relatives in the Ville Platte-Eunice area, creating the main concentration of Deshotels in the western part of old St.

Landry Parish.

After the Civil War, however, some of the descendants of Nicolas moved into the river-port town of Washington on Bayou Courtableau to engage in the river traffic between the Opelousas prairies and New Orleans.

For instance, such a move was made about 1870 by Hildevert Deshotels III (m. 1868 Zelima Spyrer), a great-grandson of Nicolas; he later turned to farming and raising cattle near the community of Deshotels, which he founded a few miles northwest of present Grand Prairie.

Still other families living in the Ville Platte-Eunice area and descendants of either Jacques, Jr., or Nicolas, during the latter part of the nineteenth century began to migrate southward to Iota, Rayne, Kaplan, Jennings, and other parts of southwest Louisiana that were beginning to boom with large-scale rice farming.

The story of Jacques Deshotels' third and younger son, Jacques-Antoine, is much less clear than that of his brothers.

Married to Adélaîde Riché in 1789, ten years later Jacques-Antoine was living on Bayou Boeuf, south of Rapides Post (near present Alexandria).

Possibly the few Deshotels families that today inhabit Avoyelles Parish may descend from Jacques-Antoine, but there is little supporting evidence for that assumption