Today the Fuselier (Fusilier) families of Louisiana are concentrated (45 percent) in the Bayou Teche and Ville Platte districts, in or near the same areas settled by their ancestors in the eighteenth century. Most of the state's Fuseliers probably descend from a single progenitor — Gabriel Fusilier de la Claire, son of a rich and socially prominent merchant in the city of Lyon, east-central France.* Shortly before 1748 Gabriel arrived in New Orleans where he was made "Director of Commerce"

of the colony.

In 1764 he married Jeanne Roman who bore him a son, Agricole.

Gabriel's military and aristocractic background probably led to his dual appointment, first in the early 1760s as commandant ofthe Poste des Attakapas (St. Martinville) and in the 1770s of the Poste des Opelousas.

After the death of his first wife he married (1771) Hélène-Elizabeth Soileau, daughter of Noel Soileau, the royal storekeeper at Natchez.

That union produced eleven children, including five sons (Gabriel, Jr., Louis-Variel, Étienne, Charles-Augustine, and Honoré) who, with Agricole of the first marriage, firmly established the Fuselier name in Louisiana.

Gabriel, Sr., had returned to France in 1789 and died there sometime later.

By 1774 Gabriel, Sr., was considered one of the richest men in the Attakapas, where he had acquired large land holdings near St. Martinville, running 750 cattle and 50 horses with the help of 30 slaves.

At least two of his sons became equally wealthy and socially prominent in the Attakapas area. Agricole Fuselier de la Claire, a sublieutenant in the local militia, owned some 6,800 acres of land between Bayou Teche and the Vermilion River in the vicinity of present Arnaudville,9 as well as a tract on Bayou Tortue west of St. Martinville.

One of his sons, Gabriel-Laclaire, settled with his family farther down the Teche near Charenton in St. Mary Parish.

There he became a wealthy antebellum sugar planter with lands along the bayou and in the adjacent Cypremort Prairie.

By 1860 he and his two sons, Alexandre-Gabriel and Alfred-Agricole, between them owned 2,650 acres of improved cane land, 675 cattle, 325 sheep, all tended by 387 slaves.

The Civil War and its aftermath, however, financially ruined the lower Teche branch of the Fuseliers, and few now live in that area. A second son of Gabriel, Sr., Gabriel, Jr., established a large cotton plantation on the upper Teche near Grand Coteau,14 and most of his descendants have remained in the St.

Martinville area.

During the early 1800s the remaining four sons of Gabriel Sr., settled in what was then the western part of St Landry Parish (present Evangeline Parish); today their descendants comprise most of the Fuselier families of Louisiana. Unlike their rich relatives of Bayou Teche the St Landry Fuseliers appear to have been mainly small farmers and stockmen. Son Louis-Variel settled near Chataignier, west of Opelousas, where he and his wife, Félicité Jeansonne, produced a family of nineteen children, including eight sons who lived to adulthood. Fuselier marriage and baptismal records, most of them filed in the churches of Opelousas, Ville Platte, and Eunice for more than four generations, suggest that Louis-Variel's brothers (Étienne, Charles, and Honoré) also settled in the same general area.

With some exceptions migration of Fuselier families out of present Evangeline Parish did not take place until the 1890s and early 1900s17 when some of the younger people were attracted by opportunities in the developing rice country in the southwestern part of the state