Jean Baptiste Baudreau II

Jean Baptiste Baudreau was born around 1717 on what is now Dauphin Island, the son of a Pascagoula militia captain and a mother recorded as a great chief's daughter, whom historians think was Choctaw. He led Choctaw auxiliaries in the 1740s and carried trade into Creek country, though French officials distrusted his Native ties. When he escaped prison and took refuge north of Mobile, Native villages stopped trading with the French until a royal pardon came. Court-martialed after a 1757 mutiny, he was broken on the wheel before the cathedral on June 7.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Cabildo — steps away
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.2 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.2 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• Congo Square — 0.5 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.

More markers nearby

• The Steamer New Orleans — steps away
• Picayune Pier — steps away
• Natchez Steamboats — steps away
• Literary Landmark — steps away