Augustin Langlois and Guy

Moll, Moll 1720, Eighteenth Century Map of France's North American Possessions. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Based on documentary records, Augustin Langlois was born on February 5, 1692, in Charlesbourg, Quebec.  He was a voyageur engaged in the Indian trade, and he and two brothers, Etienne and Louis, left Canada for the new Louisiana colony to seek their fortune by the 1720s.  He was apparently first in Mobile, where he married a woman named Marie-Catherine Baudreau, also called Graveline.  She had been born in Detroit to parents making the journey from French Canada to Mobile while they were in transit. The Langlois brothers arrived in New Orleans and apparently received tracts on the Bienville concession by 1728, but they seem to have spent considerable time in the city proper, showing up in notes of indebtedness there.  Augustin was petitioned for payment by a creditor of Nicolas La Riviere for 200 livres in 1728, due on purchase of a lot, perhaps the Royal Street one.  In 1737 he received property in Prairie du Rocher, back in the Illinois country in the vicinity of Kaskaskia, and appears to have departed soon afterwards.  He died there in 1749, at the age of 57; his wife apparently remarried and later relocated to the Opelousas district.

French Superior Council Colonial Document, 1737. Courtesy of Louisiana Historical Center's Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project. 

The Langlois family is perhaps best known for not something that they did, but for the actions of a man who had been enslaved by Augustin Langlois.  Records of the enslaved in French Louisiana are fragmentary, and we know of this man, a runaway named Guy, through a declaration on January 8, 1737 by Louis Giscard that Augustin, before leaving for Illinois, left him the task of searching for a runaway.  Two weeks later, Louis Congo, the Public Executioner, a formerly enslaved man who had been granted his freedom in return for performing this undesirable task, reported that he had been assaulted by 2 men, one of them likely the runaway owned by Langlois, and that they left behind a torn blanket and an old coat.  Etienne Langlois, Augustin’s brother, had been Louis Congo’s neighbor on Bayou Rd in the late 1720s; this may be part of how he recognized his one attacker as having belonged to Augustin.  Etienne himself is recorded as enslaving 7 people in 1727.