The nicknames of Old Kaskaskia

Everyone had one — as long as they were a French patriarch.

Kaskaskia Cemetery, November 2021

The village of Kaskaskia’s older than St. Louis, older than New Orleans. These days, there are more people in its cemetery than there are living in its town — 17 residents as of 2021, down three from the 2020 Census.

In 1818, people called Kaskaskia “Versailles of the West.” It was the capitol of Illinois, and 7,000 people lived there. In 2012, the New York Times called it “the American Atlantis.” The last big flood, in 1993, put the village under nine feet of water. You can still see the stains on the walls of Immaculate Conception Church, the biggest building in the village. It’s a Frankenstein: the altar and the sanctuary lamp date to 1736. The building was constructed in 1896, using bricks pressed in 1831, all frantically moved during the big flood of 1881, when the river changed course and the peninsula of Kaskaskia became the island of Kaskaskia.  

Without Kaskaskia, New Orleans might not exist. Its farmers kept the colonists alive, growing crops on skinny fields called arpens that ran all the way to the river. The people living in the Illinois Country sent cargo boats down the Mississippi loaded with sacks of flour and barrels of tallow. Up from New Orleans came luxuries: sugar, gold sun-dial watches, rouge. In Kaskaskia, you fried elderflowers in bear fat, then served them on faience pottery. You wore muskrat capes with silk slippers. You bathed in the river, then perfumed your hair.

Some families, like the DeRousses and the Burches, have roots running three centuries back; no one wants to leave. But people know the next big flood might be the last one for Kaskaskia. Most people stay here during the summer, in trailers, then in fall return to their ranch houses 20 miles away in Chester. (Which is no Kaskaskia, but it is the birthplace of Elie Segal, creator of Popeye, which means there are tourists, and tourists’ money. And there’s an annual Popeye parade in September, which is so easy-going no one gets upset if there are 14 Olive Oyls and no Wimpy.)

Kaskaskia is famous for being sparsely populated, for being flood-prone, and for the Liberty Bell of the West. Atlas Obscura drops its map pin for the bell in Chester, Illinios — not Kaskaskia — though its entry is mostly about Kaskaskia.

King Louis XV dispatched the Liberty Bell of the West to Kaskaskia from France in 1741, about two decades after the Jesuits arrived to establish it as a French colony; by then, it was the capital of Upper Louisiana. As Ted Fadler notes in his book, Under Three Flags: The Roots of Education in Illinois, the bell is older than Philly’s Liberty Bell. It’s also a whopping 650 pounds, inscribed with the phrase pour L’eglise des Illinois par les soins du Roi'outre l'eau (“for the Church in Illinois, by gift of the King across the water”).

The bell once lived up in the church belfry and was rung not just for Mass, but to start school classes and other civic whatsises. Now it lives in a very small building next to Immaculate Conception. You walk up to a set of wooden doors, push a giant green button that looks like it’s straight off a game-show set, and the doors slowly open by themselves. And you get a quick peek at the bell, as well as murals depicting Kaskaskia’s history.

The bell is a key part of the village’s July 4 celebrations, but not because they’re celebrating regular American Independence Day — the village commemorates Kaskaskia’s liberation from British rule by American troops, led by George Rogers Clark, in 1778, when French villagers rang it loudly to signal their liberation from the Brits.

Along with its micropopulation, Kaskaskia is a micro-tourism destination, featuring: the church, the bell, and the Kasksaksia cemetery. There, Marianne Bequette (b. 1711, d. 1740) lies not all that far from Dorothy A. Nations Brown (b. 1932, d. 2016). There are multiple Dozas (Augusta, Bernard, Beulah, Cecelia, Clara, D.A., Eileen, Eva Rose, Harry, Iliene, Joseph, Lorraine, Lydia, Maggie, Mary, Rita, Robert, Robert, Theresa, Travers, Vivian, Willa), who lend their name to nearby Dozaville. It’s also the final resting place of Antione “dit Brisetout” Cassout.

From Brisetout’s Find-a-Grave page, by way of Fort de Chartres

Born in Paris in 1812, Cassoutt definitely died in Kaskaskia, but no one knows when. He was a drummer with the Montacharveaux company, very tall, with icy blue eyes and a broad face nicked with smallpox scars. The literal translation of his nickname, brise-tout, means “un enfant ayant tendance à tout briser, personne très maladroite” (“a child who tends to break everything, a very clumsy person”). The idiomatic English translation is “butterfingers.” Which makes me wonder; did that indicate he was really bad, or was it like one of those jazz nicknames, where fat guys are called Slim?

I’d lean toward the latter, because Under Three Flags describes Brisetout, “a king’s soldier, who arrived [in Kaskaskia] in 1830 and was part of the French occupation of the colonies,” as a helpful daredevil who helped bring the King’s bell into the village. “Antoine, an expert oxen cart and yoke builder, used his carpentry sklils to help hang and position the bell inside the belfry tower,” Fadler writes.

Not really a job you’d want to hand off to someone with the un-ironic nickname “Butterfingers.”

Dis Moi Ton Pseudo!

Cassoutt wasn’t the only person in the village with a nickname. A brief jog through The Kaskasia Manuscripts, a collection of a 6,000 documents dating between 1708 to 1816, seems to suggest a lot of citizens were known by pseudos, indicated by the word “dit,” essentially “AKA.”

Digitized by The Foundation for Illinois Colonial and American Studies, the Kaskaskia Manuscripts sat in the Randolph County Courthouse for decades before being rescued by historian Clarence Alvord, and then cataloged by French literature scholar Lawrie Cena Dean in the early ’80s. You can browse through that index online. It begins in 1708 and runs through 1774 or so (as some documents aren’t dated).

Here’s a nickname roundup for Brisetout’s contemporaries, who were living in Kaskaskia in the late 1740s and early 1750s, around the time he married Catherine (nee Corset) and lived on a plot of land with “two horses, a colt and several other animals”:

Pierre Bernet, dit Sainte Foy
Leonard Billeron, dit La Fatigue (“the tiredness”)
Antoine Cheneau, dit Sans Chagrin (“without sorrow”)
Jean Chabot, dit Petit Jean (“Little John”)
Phillipe Chauvin, dit Joyeuse (“happy”)
Claude, dit D'Homme ("the man") dit La Fausse (“the false”)
Francois Corset, dit Coco
Andre Deguire, dit La Rose (“the rose”)
Pierre Desrousses, dit St. Pierre
Jean Ducoutray, dit Poullailler (“chicken”)
Pierre Dumon, dit La Violette (“the violet”)
Francois Marie Gilbert, dit Sans Peur, (“without fear”) “voyageur in the Illinois, son of Jean Simon Gilbert, dit Sans Peur.”
Charle Helie, dit Gros Charle ("fat Charle")
Pierre Garcon, dit L'Eveillee ("the awakened")
Remy Guerlot, dit l’Hermite (“the hermit”)
J. Bte. Guilbert, dit La Framboise ("the raspberry")
Jean Baptiste Gouin, dit Champagne
Rene Keresiat, dit Gregoire
Jean Baptiste Larcheveq, dit La Promenade (“the walk”)
Francois Lalumandiere, dit La Fleur (“the flower”)
Pierre Lupien, dit Baron (“the baron”)
Antoine Maniere, dit La Bastille
Joachim Miraire, dit L’espagnol (“Spanish”)
Louis Ossiau, dit Desmoulins (“windmill”)
Augustains Paraint, dit Capusaint (“captivating”)
Jacques Philippe, dit Dulongpre (“from the long meadow”)
Mathurin Pian, dit La Castille (“the Castillian”)
Pierre Pillet, dit La Sonde (“the probe”)
Eugene Porres, dit Beausoleil (“beautiful sun”)
Paul Poupar, dit La Fleur (“the flower”)
Francois Sebastien, dit Caranrie (“the canary”)
Philippe Suroint, “master shoemaker” dit Flamant (“flamingo”)
Francois Thaumur, dit La Source (“the spring”)
Jean Baptiste Texier, dit La Vigne (“the vine”)
Jean Baptiste Trudeau, dit La Veau ("the calf")

Names to Conjure With

As amusing as some of these nicknames are, you can’t avoid the fact that only French men got to wear whimsical “dits.” Scrolling through the Kaskaskia Manuscripts, you see French women were mentioned by first and last name (sometimes even their maiden names), but never got a nickname. Enslaved Africans and Native Americans — who lived here for 10,000 years before the French colonized the Midwest — are rarely named in official records. When they are, it’s only a given name (this was common during slavery, as Lolly Bowean explains in her excellent Chicago Tribune article about the roots of her own surname).

Here are the names of enslaved people who appear in the village records, this over a much larger spread of documents, dating from 1739 to 1750:

Accipa
Catherine and her son, Jean
Charlotte
Eliseth
Françoise
Malade and her 12-year-old son, Pierrot
Margueritte
Marianne
Mouca, wife Marie, son Joseph and daughters Marie and Ursule
Pierrot
Theireise
Thomas

As the records move into the 1760s, we start to see the tiniest clues that Illinois would be one of the first free states — and last names start to make an appearance for formerly enslaved people:

Donation made by Francois Mercier to Jean Louis, a freed slave.
Emancipation of Pierre Blot, a slave belonging to Lagrange.

As Shakespeare once wrote, what’s in a name?

Everything.