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A casquette girl () but also known historically as a casket girl or a Pelican girl, was a woman brought from France to the French colonies of Louisiana to marry.See Dureau, Lorena. The Last Casquette Girl, 1981, Pinnacle Books The name derives from the small chests, known as casquettes, in which they carried their clothes.Higginbotham, Jay. Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711, pp.106–07. Museum of the City of Mobile, 1977. .
Later women, called correction girls, were supplied to the colonists by raking the streets of Paris for undesirables, or by emptying the houses of correction. France also sent women convicted along with their debtor husbands, and in 1719, deported 209 women felons "who were of a character to be sent to the French settlement in Louisiana.".Katy F. Morlas, "La Madame et la Mademoiselle," graduate thesis in history, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2003 The women sent to the West Indies were often from poor houses in France, but reputed to be former prostitutes from La Salpêtrière. In 1713 and again in 1743, the authorities in Saint-Domingue complained that Paris sent the settlers unsuitable former prostitutes as wives, and the practice was discontinued in the mid 18th-century.Trevor Burnard, John Garrigus: The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue
The casquette girls, however, were conspicuous by reason of their virtue. They were recruited from church charitable institutions (usually and ) and although poor, were guaranteed to be virginity.Clark, Emily. Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834, pp. 12–23. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. . It later became a matter of pride on the Gulf Coast to show descent from them. The first casquette girls reached Mobile, Alabama, in 1704, Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1719, and New Orleans in 1728.Thomason, Michael. Mobile : the new history of Alabama's first city, pages 20-21. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 2001.
The 23 Pelican Girls arrived first on Massacre Island in late July then took shallow-draft boats up Mobile Bay to 27 Mile Bluff weighing anchor on August 1, 1704. They had sailed from France in April of that year on the ship Le Pélican. A stop in Cuba had resulted in many of the crew and young women receiving mosquito bites and thus becoming infected with Yellow Fever. Two of the young women died soon upon arrival and the epidemic spread throughout the fort even taking the life of adventurer Henri de Tonti. Disease notwithstanding, most of the young women were married to men of their choosing within a month. All of the girls were between 14 and 19 years old.
Unhappy with new husbands that spent much of their time in the woods, not building new homes or planting them gardens, the girls staged what became known as the “Petticoat Rebellion.” Until they were provided a roof and food they refused “bed and board.” The men eventually came around.
Historian Joan Martin maintains that there is little documentation that casket girls, considered among the ancestors of white French Creoles, were sent to Louisiana. Dr. Marcia Zug argues that there was, in fact, no evidence to support the fact that these women existed as such. The Ursulines supposedly chaperoned the casket girls until they married, but the order has denied this. Martin suggests this was a myth, and that interracial relationships occurred from the beginning of the encounter among Europeans, Native Americans and Africans. She also writes that some Creole families who today identify as white had ancestors during the colonial period who were African or multiracial, and whose descendants married white over generations.Joan M. Martin, Placage and the Louisiana Gens de Couleur Libre, in Creole language, edited by Sybil Kein, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2000.
In later years, it was common for Louisianans to claim that their descent was through the casquette girls rather than the correction girls, and later researchers would remark that while none of the correction girls had apparently had children, the casquette girls had been remarkably fertile.
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