Most people associate the name Lafitte with the notorious privateer, smuggler, and onetime patriot, Jean Lafitte of Barataria, and they are surprised to learn that today the surname is found not in southern Louisiana, but mainly in the northwestern part of the state around Mansfield and Shreveport. Completely unrelated to the pirate Jean, Paul-Bouët Lafitte, born in the town of Lectoure, Gascogne, southwestern France, came to the French settlement of Natchitoches Post on the Red River, probably in the late 1760s.* There he became a merchant and rancher, living most of the time on his holdings in the Bayou Pierre district northwest of Natchitoches and near the old border between French Louisiana and Spanish Texas.

Paul-Bouët and his several sons (by two wives, Madeleine Grappe, who died in 1781, and Marianne DeSoto) were the founders of the Lafittes of northwestern Louisiana.

Most of the present descendants who carry that surname still reside in the general area of initial settlement. Possibly the few families that now live in New Orleans may stem from various Lafittes who inhabited the city during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In 1787 Paul-Bouët Lafitte was running 350 cattle and 70 horses on his land in the Bayou Pierre district.

Three years previously he had obtained from the Spanish authorities a tract between Bayou Pierre and Bayou Nanticole in the area known as the "Neutral Ground,"

territory later claimed by both Louisiana and Texas. This large tract was granted in favor of Paul-Bouët's two elder sons, Pierre and Jean-Baptiste, as a vacherie for raising cattle and horses.

Both father and sons also may have engaged in illicit commerce, for Bayou Pierre at that time was the common route taken by traders carrying contraband merchandise to Indian tribes farther north.

Two other sons of Paul-Bouët, Césaire and Louis, in 1796 acquired a grant of 52,390 acres, called Las Hormigas, between the Sabine River and Bayou San Patrice south of present Mansfield. When the brothers in 1825 petitioned the United States land commission for title confirmation of this large tract, they claimed that they had moved their families, slaves, and livestock into the area soon after the land was granted.

The U.S. Federal Census of 1850 enumerated 13 Lafitte families living in the western portion of DeSoto Parish, the area that contained the grants mentioned above.

Soon after the founding of Shreveport in 1836, a few families from the French settlements around Natchitoches and the Bayou Pierre district began to migrate to the town.

The migrants may have included some Lafittes.

The present large Lafitte concentration in both Shreveport and Mansfield, however, probably resulted from influx since World War II. The few Lafittes in Texas also may reflect recent migration from northwestern Louisiana to industrial centers