[3] Today the parish is the base of the federally recognized Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe, who have a reservation there.

Mounds of its major city, Cahokia, are preserved in western Illinois across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri.

They are the largest Native American tribe in Avoyelles Parish and have a reservation that extends into Marksville.

The contemporary Creole traditions, in both music and food, reflect Native American, African and European influences.

The central part of Avoyelles Parish is sited on a large plateau, slightly above the floodplain of the waterways.

The merchants wanted to conduct fur trading with the Tunica Tribe and the missionaries hoped to convert the natives to Christianity.

Franco-European settlers first called this area Hydropolis, meaning water city, referring to the marshes and bayous.

After his troops failed to regain control over Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Napoleon withdrew from North America.

He sold the large Louisiana Purchase territory in 1803 to the United States under President Thomas Jefferson.

Many of the French people who settled Avoyelles Parish immigrated from France in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The Spanish influence in Louisiana was more dominant in New Iberia — this was named after colonists from the Iberian Peninsula, commonly known as Spain and Portugal.

They were from a different geographic area of Canada than the Acadians of present-day Nova Scotia, who were expelled by the British from their homeland (Acadie) beginning in 1755 during the Seven Years' War with France.

Many deported Acadians eventually made it to Louisiana from 1764 - 1788, after several years of living in exile along the eastern Atlantic seaboard, Canada, St. Pierre and France.

[4] In the later 19th century, immigrants from Scotland, Belgium, Italy, and Germany also settled here, following the French Creoles.

Their direct ties to Europe set them apart from the Acadians (Cajuns) of southern Louisiana, who came from a culture established for generations in Canada.

[5] At the turn of the 19th century, free people of color of African-French descent also settled in Avoyelles.

From the 1800s until the mid-1900s, local Confederate units and local newspaper reports in The Villager always referred to the Avoyelles French families as Creoles, the term for native-born people of direct descent from early French colonists and born in the colony.

[5] Following the disastrous Great Flood of 1927, the US Army Corps of Engineers built a system of levees along the Mississippi River.