A lake, a tree or an Indian chief?

I’d always thought the name Lacassine, which refers to a bayou and a community in Jefferson Davis Parish, was the name of an Attakapas chief. But some other theories have recently come to hand.
Linguist William Read discusses the name in his classic 1931 study, “Louisiana-French,” and gives it the Indian origin.
“Lacasine was an Attakapas chief whose memory is perpetuated by the name of a large bayou in Southwest Louisiana, now spelled Lacassine, but formerly Lacasine, Lacacene, and Cassine,” Read says. But he wonders how the Indian chief got the name.
He thinks it ultimately may have come from the Louisiana French name for the yaupon shrub, cassinier. The shrub thrives in Louisiana and the Indians used its leaves, according to Read, “to prepare a famous black drink for use on all festive and ceremonial occasions. This black drink ... was held in such esteem by the Southern tribes that they never went to war without drinking it in huge quantities.”
Read quotes an early traveler named Bossu, who, in 1771, wrote “Travels Through That Part of North America Formerly Called Louisiana.” According to Bossu, the drink was called Cassine.
“This is the leaf of a little tree which is very shady; the leaf is about the size of a farthing, but dentated on its margins. They toast these leaves as we do coffee, and drink the infusion of them with great ceremony. When this diuretic potion is prepared, the young people go to present it in Calabashes formed into cups, to the chiefs and warriors, that is the honorables, according to their rank and degree. That same order is observed when they present the Calumet to smoke out of; whilst you drink they howl as loud as they can, and diminish the sound gradually; when you have ceased drinking, they take their break, and when you drink again, they set up their howls again. These sorts of orgies sometimes last from six in the morning to two o’clock in the afternoon.”
The tree may have been Ilex cassine, a member of the holly family that is native to coastal areas from Virginia to Texas.
Read suggests that the Indian chief Lacassine was given the name by the French “because he was a noted drinker of cassine, or because his village was situated among yaupon trees.” But the linguist and others say that the name could have simpler origins. It may have derived from la cassine, French for a little shack. The name may have been given to a place where someone built a hut on the bayou.
The late John Lynch, the pioneering marine biologist who studied the wetlands of south Louisiana, was one of several people who say the name has nothing to do with leaves or huts.
Lynch said he’d always heard that the place name is a derivation of lac a cygne (swan lake), because swans once gathered at a little lake formed by a widening of the bayou.
Read does note that the whistling swan was once common in Louisiana and that swan feathers were once used for the headbands of Indian chiefs. Maybe chief Lacassine got his name because he wore a headband of feathers from lac a cygne.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.