Louis Juchereau de St. Denis (1676-1744)

Born at Beauport in New France in 1676, St. Denis came to Louisiana in 1699 with his cousin Iberville and learned wilderness skills from the Karankawa and Caddo, becoming fluent in Caddo. A Spanish commander arrested him in Coahuila for breaking trade rules, then asked him to guide the Ramón expedition to East Texas. During his detention he courted Manuela Sánchez Navarro, the commander's step-granddaughter, and they married in 1716. He took command at Natchitoches in 1722 and died here on 11 June 1744, aged sixty-seven.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.7 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.8 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.4 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Natchitoches Indians — steps away
• Roque House (circa 1797) — steps away
• Site of Fort Claiborne — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — steps away