♂Augustus A. Tougas dit Laviolette

Augustus A. Tougas dit Laviolette (about 1776 – 31 May 1849) was a French trader and river pilot from Post Vincennes who settled near Rochester on the Wabash, in what is now Wabash County, Illinois. A county history published in 1883 remembers him as a man “said to have been six and one-half feet in stature”, whose word “was law” among the Piankashaw, with whom he stayed and traded through the years of conflict on the frontier. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Augustin Tougas Lovellette (1809–1866).

Early life

He was born at Vincennes about 1776, the son of Joseph Seraphin Tougas dit Laviolette, a French Canadian from Boucherville, and Jeanne Marie Cardinal, whose family belonged to the post. Laviolette was not a separate surname but the family’s by-name, a “dit” name carried since his great-grandfather Guillaume Tougas dit Laviolette, born in France in 1674; in Illinois it became the surname itself, written Lavulette, Lavellette and finally Lovellette. His father died at Vincennes in 1793, and his mother married André Montplaisir in 1795.

The 1883 county history names four Tougas brothers, August, William, Joseph and Francis, “all well formed, athletic men”, and a local history of the old Rochester cemetery adds that Joseph and Francis settled around St. Francisville and kept the name Tougas, while Augustus and William settled around Rochester and used Lovellette. The Vincennes register names all three as sons of Joseph Tougas and Jeanne Cardinal: Joseph, born in 1774, Guillaume (William), born in 1779, and François Xavier (Francis), born in 1783. A pioneer column in the Mt. Carmel Republican in 1899 says that before he settled at Rochester he “and his brother lived at ‘Old Post Vincennes,’ and spent much of their time trading with the Indians up and down the Wabash”.

Trader and river pilot

The 1899 column, which followed a story the paper had printed the week before about his encounter with robbers, tells two more of his adventures, fifty years after his death. Once, near the place where Shawneetown was later built, he tricked a party of Indians clamouring for whiskey by pouring it into an old salt keg, then rowed off under fire from their flint-lock guns. He also worked as a flatboat pilot, and on a pork boat bound for New Orleans, whose owner fed the crew on side meat while the cargo held hams, he settled the matter by fighting the owner on the river bank, on the terms “Me lick you, we eat ham; you lick me, we eat side meat”; the crew ate ham for the rest of the trip.

Marriage and Rochester

On 6 July 1801, at St. Francis Xavier in Vincennes, he married Ellenore S. Renaud dit Deslauriers, a daughter of Louis Renaud dit Deslauriers and Marguerite Godere.

Lines of descent

They were fourth cousins, both descended from Pierre Maillet and Marie-Anne Hardy of Montreal.

Settling at Rochester

The county history counts the Tougas family as prominent among the few French families who first settled on the Wabash near Rochester, in Coffee Precinct, about 1800. A family compilation records that he kept a trading post with the Piankashaw at the mouth of Coffee Creek, and that the first deed recorded in Edwards County, in January 1815, conveyed land to “August Lavulette, dit Tougas”; Wabash County was not formed out of Edwards until 1824. The couple still took their children across the river to be baptized at Vincennes: a certificate copied from the register in 1927 records a daughter, Leonore, born on 3 March 1804, with William Tougas as godfather, and Augustin and Henrietta were baptized there in 1814 and 1818. The same compilation says the couple were Roman Catholics who brought up their family in that faith.

He bought public land at Wabash, Illinois, in two purchases: on 3 December 1814, 158.75 acres at two dollars an acre, with the patent dated 6 September 1817; and on 13 December 1815, 160 acres in two tracts of 80 acres each, at the same price. In 1830 he was the head of a household of eleven, recorded in Edwards County, Illinois, aged fifty to fifty-nine.

His great-grandson B. A. Harvey, who was born at Rochester in 1850 “not twenty rods from the trading-post of his mother’s grandfather”, wrote down the family’s memory of him in a sketch of the county’s history printed in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society in 1918. Harvey calls the Tougas brothers the first white settlers of the county and dates their trading point on the site of Old Rochester to 1800. He writes that Augustus was said to stand seven and a half feet tall, that his word “was law” among the Piankashaw, whom he had beaten at their own wrestling and athletic games, and that he was never molested when other settlers were attacked. Harvey had heard his great-aunt, one of Augustus’s daughters, say that as many as three hundred Indians would gather about her father’s trading place, and he adds that the house Augustus built on the bluff above the river was still standing until a few years before he wrote.

The couple had at least eight children, the youngest, Guillaume, born about 1820. Ellenore died in July 1822. On 5 December 1825, in Knox County, Indiana, he married again, probably to Angelique Cournoyer.

Later life and death

According to the 1883 history, in 1838 he sold his property at Rochester and moved to Mount Carmel, where he kept a hotel for several years before returning to Coffee Precinct. In 1840 the census wrote his name “Augustus Savallette” and listed him in Wabash County, aged sixty to sixty-nine, with a woman of forty to forty-nine and two girls in the house. He died there on 31 May 1849 and was buried near Rochester, under the same stone as Ellenore, which names him “Augustus A. Lovellette”. In 1883 his eldest daughter, Mrs. Stewart, was living in Texas, and another daughter, the wife of Captain Sharp, at Mount Carmel.

Notes

The family record gives his birth as 1777, and a family narrative gives 1779. His joint gravestone with his wife Ellenore gives his age at death on 31 May 1849 as “in the 78th Year of his age”, which would put his birth between June 1771 and May 1772. That cannot be right. His parents married at St. Francis Xavier in Vincennes on 16 January 1773, so a birth in 1771 or 1772 would have come before their marriage, and his mother, baptized on 17 March 1756, would then have been fifteen or sixteen. The stone’s age is taken as overstated. A Find a Grave memorial gives his birth as 1776 and his age at death as 72 to 73. A birth about 1776 fits the gap among his brothers’ and sisters’ births, between Joseph, born in 1774, and Guillaume, born in 1779. No baptism of his is known. His parentage rests on his marriage at Vincennes on 6 July 1801, which an index of the register gives with his parents as Joseph Touga and Janette Cardinal; the entry itself has not been seen. An online index gives 2 April 1779, but that is the baptism date of his brother Guillaume, not his.

The 1883 county history explains the name Lavulette by saying that his mother, as a widow, married a man of that name and that some of her children took their stepfather’s name; a family compilation repeats the story. It is mistaken: Laviolette was the family’s by-name in Canada generations earlier, and his mother’s second husband was André Montplaisir. The same history recalls his eldest daughter as born at Vincennes in 1803; the 1927 certificate of the daughter Leonore’s baptism gives 3 March 1804.

The second marriage

The compiled Indiana marriage index for 1802 to 1850 dates the marriage 5 December 1825 at Knox and gives the bride only as “Mrs. ??? Mallet”, with no first name. A family compilation says that he later married a woman named Theriac and had a daughter, Harriett, who married a Keen and lived in Missouri; that account rests on the compilation alone. The name Angelique Cournoyer is attached to this marriage in the family’s compiled record, and the body uses it as probable only.