The French policy of sending young women known as
King's Daughters () to their colonies for marriage goes back to the 17th-century. Young women were sent to Canada, Louisiana and the French West Indies. 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.". 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. The casquette girls, however, were conspicuous by reason of their virtue. They were recruited from church charitable institutions (usually
orphanages and
convents) and although poor, were guaranteed to be
virgins. It later became a matter of pride on the Gulf Coast to show descent from them. 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. A stop in Cuba had resulted in many of the crew and young women receiving mosquito bites and thus becoming infected with Yellow Fever. 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.” The
Ursuline order of nuns 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. 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. ==Cultural impact==