Most Spanish surnames established early in Louisiana were those of colonists, such as the Canary Islanders, or Isleños, recruited to strengthen Spain's hold on territory newly acquired from France. The name Ortego, however, now common in the southwestern part of the state, can be traced to a single individual, Joaquin de Ortega y Prieto (born 1755 near Valladolid, north-central Spain), who arrived in Louisiana probably a few years after the Spanish takeover in the 1760s.* Although he was well educated, in what capacity he came is unknown; he may have been active in military operations against Indians on the Texas-Louisiana frontier.

It is known that in 1782, at the age of 27, at Opelousas Post, he married Marie-Josephe Demasainte Bermúdez de Soto,3 daughter of Manuel Antonio Bermúdez de Soto of the Spanish military and Marie des Neiges de St. Denis, of the rich and renowned Louis Juchereau de St. Denis family of Natchitoches Post.

The newly wedded couple moved almost immediately to the Spanish garrison at Pensacola (Florida), where Joaquin Ortega served as quartermaster of the royal artillery, and where two of his seven sons were born.

Sometime between 1784 and 1788 the family returned to Louisiana to establish a household on Bayou Chicot, the frontier of settlement in the northwestern part of old St. Landry Parish (present Evangeline Parish).

A strong reason for settling in that remote area may have been that Joaquin's mother-in-law owned two tracts of land, each of more than 1,350 acres, near the spring of Bayou Chicot.

Later, Ortega himself obtained a grant of some 5,400 acres on Bayou Cocodrie, east of Bayou Chicot, probably for raising cattle.

The pine-dotted prairies from Bayou Chicot south to the present site of Ville Platte thus became the center of the Ortego families of Louisiana, all descendants of the Spaniard, Joaquin Ortega. Settling in that immediate area, his seven sons all took French-speaking wives,9 and by the early nineteenth century the name Ortega had changed to its present form, Ortego.

Since stock raising was a major occupation in the prairies of western St. Landry during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it might be assumed that most of the Ortegos of that period were cattlemen, as were some of their French-speaking neighbors, such as the Fontenots and Guillorys. Available data do not substantiate that assumption, however; for instance, during the period 1810 to 1823 only one son of Joaquin Ortega, Anicet, had registered a cattle brand at Opelousas Post.

Small subsistence fanning was the more likely lot of the Ortegos during much of the nineteenth century.

Church and civil records indicate that no significant migration of Ortego families outside the Bayou ChicotVille Platte area occurred until the latter part of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s several had settled south of present Basile and Eunice in what is now the northwestern part of Acadia Parish;12 one or two families had moved into the Grande Prairie area north of Opelousas; and during the period 1888 to 1896 several had reached the Crowley and Jennings areas where rice farming was the likely attraction.

Movement farther into southwestern Louisiana, southeastern Texas, into Avoyelles Parish to the north, and to the cities probably did not take place until after World War I