Bayou Teche Dispatches

Remembering Polycarp: A Cajun TV Show Host for Children

2012-01-26T18:10:00.015-06:00

[I originally wrote this article for Wikipedia. Since the writing is my own, I repost it here on my blog. I include extra images below and I'll add more information about Polycarp shortly.]

Polycarp (pronounced PO-LEE-CAR in the Cajun French manner) was a fictional character who served as a local children's television show host. His program, "Polycarp and Pals," aired from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s on KATC Channel 3 in Lafayette, Louisiana.[1]

Rough print of
Polycarp promotional photo.
(Source: KATC-TV 3)

Background

Polycarp was portrayed by KATC employee John Plauché (27 July 1932 - June 1978),[2] whom KATC hired in May 1963 and whom it credited for the show's originality. "It is a land created through the wonderful imagination of John Plauche, who as Polycarp Phillipe Pecot Number 2, makes our lives a little happier, the world a brighter place [in which] to live."[3] (Polycarp would often jokingly warn viewers in his Cajun-accented English "Don’t ask for Number One ‘cuz dat’s my daddy and dey don’t like him anyway.")[4]

Polycarp on the studio set.
(Source: KATC-TV 3)

An avuncular Cajun dressed in a plaid shirt, waistcoat, and crumpled straw hat, Polycarp lived on a houseboat, the Narcisse Number 3, "somewhere way back in the Anse La Butte Swamp midway between the Parishes of Fantaisie and Réalité," as a KATC newsletter put it in 1967.[5] (In later programs Polycarp traded his houseboat for a general store.) KATC described Polycarp's imaginary world as "A modern-day 'fairytale' land of happiness and laughter for girls and boys and tall people . . . undoubtedly the happiest place in Acadiana." The station likened his program to "a cruise . . . [through] his small but laughing world of Cajun friends and swamp critters . . . [such as] Maurice Mostique, the giant mosquito with a wingspan of 13 ¾ feet, [who] sings a pesky song while Ole Blue, the 738 ½ pound junk-collecting catfish, thumps against the boat as we float along the bayou."[6]

Polycarp at the mic.
(Source: KATC-TV 3)

In addition to showing classic Warner Bros. cartoons, the program featured original skits and recurring characters. Those characters included T'Toot, a retired Indian fighter; the Crazy Professor, an inventor and graduate emeritus of UPI (University of Pecan Island); Tante Baseline, owner of the Anse La Butte Swamp Gumbo Factory; Joycie, a female filling station attendant "who's the world's champion dual-wheel semi-trailer flat-tire fixer"; The Headless Man, who "sent his head out to be cleaned and it was accidentally sent to the Avery Island Pickle Factory instead" and lived in the locked cabin of Polycarp's boat; Doctor Rollingstone, "the hipster swamp doctor who has a transistor radio stuck in his stethoscope"; and King Simon, "the duly elected boss of the swamp."[7]

Polycarp swamped by fan mail, 1967.
(Source: Acadiana [KATC-TV 3 newsletter])

Popularity

KATC noted that, "Polycarp's much loved pals . . . [are] as familiar to the children of Acadiana as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck" and claimed that Polycarp was "ranked as the top children's TV personality in the state."[8] As evidence of this popularity, Polycarp received over 3,000 letters and postcards from local children over a seven-day period during a fall 1967 Halloween costume giveaway promotion.[9] In October that year, the University of Southwestern Louisiana's Alumni Association, Athletic Association, and its band named Polycarp the first "Mr. Acadiana," an honor it bestowed annually during the school's homecoming football game to the USL alumnus who best "fosters the tradition and the ideals of the school and of the area. . . ." (Plauché had graduated from the university in 1957.)[10] By 1967 Polycarp appeared in Lafayette-area parades driving a restored 1935 International Harvester vegetable truck, dubbed by KATC the "Poly-Car" (a play on the Cajun French pronunciation of "Polycarp").[11]

In 1976, producer J. D. "Jay" Miller of Crowley, Louisiana, issued a 45 RPM record on his Yule Time record label featuring Polycarp reading “The Night Before Christmas.”[12] (Listen to the recording here.)

Polycarp 45 RPM record, 1976.
Note that although his name is misspelled,
John Plauché is credited as the recording's writer.
(Source: Author's collection)

Theme song

Polycarp's eponymous theme song (rendered "Polycarp Phillip Pecot #II" on the 45 RPM record label) was recorded in 1966 by local swamp pop musician Johnnie Allan to the tune of The McCoys' 1965 Number 1 hit song "Hang On Sloopy".[13] (Listen to the recording here.)

Broadcast schedule

In spring 1969, "Polycarp and Pals" aired for one hour each weekday and Saturday beginning at 7 a.m. CST (although on some weekdays it ran for an hour and a half, ending at 8:30 a.m.).[14] There is some evidence that a short-lived spinoff program, "The Polycarp Palace," aired on Tuesdays from 3:30 p.m. to 5:50 p.m. beginning in October 1967.[15]

TV Guide listing for "Polycarp & Pals"
from Wednesday, April 30, 1969.
(Source: Author's collection)

Footnotes

1. Shane K. Bernard, The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), p. 104.
2. Social Security Death Index, http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/
3. Patti Taylor, "Camera Angles," Acadiana, July 1967, p. 3
4. Debrah Royer Richardson, "Performing Louisiana: The History of Cajun Dialect Humor and Its Impact on the Cajun Cultural Identity," Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Theatre, Louisiana State University, August 2007, p. 197.
5. Patti Taylor, "Camera Angles," Acadiana, July 1967, p. 3.
6. Richardson, "Performing Louisiana, p. 197.
7. Patti Taylor, "Camera Angles," Acadiana, July 1967, p. 3.
8. Ibid.; "Polycarp 'Mr. Acadiana,'" Acadiana, November 1967, p. 1.
9. "Polycarp's Pals Keep Postman Busy," Acadiana , November 1967, p. 3.
10. "Polycarp 'Mr. Acadiana,'" Acadiana , November 1967, p. 1.
11. "This Is It . . . The Poly-Car," Acadiana , November 1967, p. 1.
12. Polycarp, “The Night Before Christmas,” Yule Time 45 RPM record 45-1000, 1976.
13. Johnnie Allan, "Polycarp Phillip Pecot #II (Hang On Sloopy)," Jin label (Ville Platte, Louisiana) #198, 1966. See Johnnie Allan Singles.
14. TV Guide, 26 April-2 May 1969 (Louisiana edition).
15. Patti Taylor, "Camera Angles," Acadiana , November 1967, p. 3.

The "Poly-Car," a vehicle in which Polycarp
appeared in parades around the Lafayette area.
(Source: Acadiana [KATC-TV 3 newsletter])

Addendum of 4 February 2012

One day around 1972 when I was about five years old my family and I were boating on Lake Henderson in the Atchafalya Basin. It was towards the end of the day and we were heading back to the landing.

As we crossed the stump-strewn lake Dad spotted a man in a small motor boat trying without success to start his outboard.

When the man saw us he waved for assistance, so Dad steered over to throw him a line. As we drew near I recognized the luckless boater. And I can imagine myself thinking with astonishment, "It's Polycarp!"

Of course, it was really John Plauché, but for me, as for many kids in Acadiana, Polycarp was not a character played by a local actor, but a real person.

To me the man I saw was Polycarp . . . in a boat . . . in the Atchafalaya Basin . . . and everyone knew from TV that Polycarp lived on a boat in the Atchafalaya Basin!

That was the day my family rescued Polycarp Phillip Pecot #II.

From Jet Fighters to Football: Origin of the Phrase "Ragin' Cajun"

2012-01-17T18:02:00.014-06:00

As I've mentioned previously, I enjoy debunking myths. One myth that came up recently is the claim that "UL Lafayette [the University of Louisiana at Lafayette] was the first [entity] to adopt the nickname Ragin’ Cajuns" (The [Lafayette] Independent, 17 January 2012).

Actually, according to archival documents U.S. Marine Corps Reserve fighter squadron VMF-143 adopted the nickname "Ragin' Cajun" as early as 1950. (Louisiana historian Carl A. Brasseaux made the discovery; I merely located a couple more documents that confirmed the finding.) Note that the squadron technically used the term in the singular tense; still, one sometimes finds the term applied to the squadron in the plural.

I found this Ragin' Cajun squadron logo in the National Archives;
note the date 1 December 1950 in the lower right corner.
(Source: National Archives and Records Administration,
Washington, D.C.)

In short, the U.S. Marines fighter squadron used the term over a decade before UL-Lafayette (known at the time as the University of Southwestern Louisiana, or USL) informally adopted the nickname and about a quarter-century before the university formally adopted it.

Details from the back of the National Archives copy
of the Ragin' Cajun squadron logo, dated here 3 August 1956.
(Source: National Archives and Records Administration,
Washington, D.C.)

As I wrote in my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2004):

South Louisianans who comprised Marine reserve squadron VMF-143 expressed ethnic pride by nicknaming themselves the Ragin' Cajuns, the earliest known use of this now familiar phrase. The squadron's emblem was a charging cartoon pelican (the Louisiana state bird) bedecked in boxing gloves and carrying a lighted bomb in its mouth. According to former squadron commander Carol Bernard, the Marine Corps activated several Ragin' Cajun pilots during wartime, transferred them to other squadrons, and sent them on combat missions over Korea in new jet fighters.

VMF-143, the Ragin' Cajun squadron, evidently posing somewhere
outside south Louisiana, given the hill in the background. (Source: Carol Bernard, New Iberia, La.)

As for when UL-Lafayette began to use the "Ragin' Cajuns" nickname, I noted in The Cajuns:

During this same period [1974], USL officially renamed its football team the Ragin' Cajuns, a name it had informally adopted in 1963, when the school's student newspaper noted, "USL football fans are coining another nickname. . . . Instead of the official Battling Bulldogs, Southwestern boosters have started referring to Coach Russ Faulkinberry's squad as the Raging [sic] Cajuns" because nearly all the players were south Louisianians. The school's other athletic teams soon were donning the name on their traditional red and white uniforms.

I date the official change of the team's name to 1974 because of the headline "Augie's Doggies Turn Cajun" appearing in the 1975 USL L'Acadien student yearbook. The article featured the previous year's football season; "Augie" referred to then coach Augie Tammariello.

Although UL trademarked "Ragin' Cajuns," the Discovery Channel is now using the term as the title of a new "reality" program about Louisiana shrimpers.

A clearer version of the Ragin' Cajun fighter squadron logo (no date).
(Source: Carl A. Brasseaux Collection,
Southwestern Archives and Manuscripts Collection,
UL-Lafayette, Lafayette, La.)

More on the Elusive Andre Massé, Early Settler of the Attakapas District

2011-12-14T11:05:00.003-06:00

In his books Athanase de Mézières and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1768-1780 (1914, as editor) and Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish Colonial History and Administration (1915, as author), historian Herbert Eugene Bolton provided valuable information about Andre Massé, the earliest known European settler in the Attakapas District of south Louisiana.

One of Bolton’s sources about Massé was a 1756 petition that Massé wrote to the Viceroy of New Spain in Mexico City, per the governor of the province of Texas at Los Adaes (near Natchitoches in present-day Louisiana), to ask permission to move from the Attakapas to the presidio of San Agustín de Ahumada in southeast Texas.

No images of Andre Massé are known to exist,
but I like to think he looked something like this.
(Source: Frederic Remington, 1880 [public domain])

What was Massé's reason for wanting to move from French to Spanish territory?

Intriguingly, he wanted to free his slaves (more difficult to do in French territory than Spanish) and to leave them part of his estate.

Massé did eventually free his slaves, not in Texas, but in Louisiana, because the Viceroy of Mexico — no doubt suspicious of a Frenchman wanting to reside in the Spanish Empire — rejected his petition.

Last year I decided to track down Massé’s original petition to see if it contained historical information not mentioned by Bolton. According to Bolton, the original document sat in the Archivo General de la Nación, the Mexican national archives in Mexico City. Bolton even gave very specific locations for this document, noting that it lay in the Correspondencia de los Virreyes, vol. 1, Amarillas, 1, 1755-1756, or, more specifically, in Correspondencia de los Virreyes II, serie i, folio 264.

I know one person in all of Mexico and she happens to be a professor of history in Mexico City, fluent in Spanish and well familiar with the Archivo General. At my request she went to the Archivo to search for Massé’s petition — and could not find it! The collection, she stated, was a terrible mess. Nothing was where it was supposed to be.

It had been a hundred years since Bolton had examined Massé’s petition in the Archivo General. Who knows what could have happened to the document in the meantime?

Instead of giving up the search, I checked to see if Bolton did not leave behind his research notes. As it turned out, he left his notes to UC-Berkeley, which had compiled an extremely detailed finding aid for the collection. After studying the finding aid, I hired a graduate student at Berkeley to go to Bancroft Library and look in one particular box.

Title page of one of Bolton's books (1914).

According to the finding aid, that box contained documents pertaining to the incursion of Frenchmen onto Spanish soil.

Sure enough, there was Bolton’s typewritten transcript of Massé’s 1756 petition to the Viceroy of New Spain.

Below I post a translation of Massé’s original document, or, rather, of Bolton’s transcript of Massé’s original document. The original was written to the Spanish in French, and not by Massé, but by his friend, the troubled French cleric Abbé Didier. (I’ll explain later why I say “troubled.”) The translation is by my acquaintance, Dr. Judith Rygiel of Carelton University in Ottawa, and myself. (That is, I tweaked her translation.)

I might eventually post a transcript (per Bolton) of the original French document and, for comparison, a transcript (again per Bolton) of the official Spanish translation prepared in 1756. Indeed, in a couple of instances Bolton’s transcript of the original French document appears to contain typographical errors, and the only way I could figure out a misspelled or missing word was to consult the Spanish translation.

Here is the translation (which I consider a work in progress):

Monsieur Massé, settler, distinguished and by his birth and merit, presently on his cattle ranch in the Attakapas, a dependent of New Orleans, arriving finally at an advanced age without having effected the intention of giving liberty to his slaves, and at the same time to leave them his goods after his death, is forced and obliged to turn to his Excellency, the Illustrious Monseigneur, Viceroy of Mexico, to put him and his dependents under his strong protection. This is directed, by the intervention of Monsieur the Abbé Didier, secular priest, his partner in his cattle, to Monsieur le Gouverneur of the post of Adays, to take the action most suitable to the matter so that the affair does not transpire until after its entire execution. The said Sieur Massé reserving the right to deduce from His Excellency the legitimate reasons that commit him to this change.

The said Monsieur le Gouverneur of Adays, to whom the said Sieur Massé is not unknown, knows well the advantages which will result from the retreat of the said Sieur Massé and of the establishment, which he can form, by himself, in the St. Augustin post, without it being necessary of the said Sieur Didier to actually describe them. That which he can truly assure is that His Majesty will find in one and the other as much and affection as in his most loyal subjects.

1st. The said Massé possesses in common with the said Abbé Didier a considerable number of cattle, cows and horses, which can be easily transported to the citadel of St. Augustin, which will be a great benefit for the inhabitants of the post.

2nd. The large and the small Attakapas, entirely devoted to the said M. Massé and who have their village on the other side of the River, are sure to follow him, by means of which no one will have to fear any enemy of that side.

3rd. His male Negroes, which are for the most part already married to his female Negroes, and who have children, are one seed, these same all transported to the place, having [no] need to take them further.

4th. The said M. Massé knows the strength and the foibles of the [Indian] Nations of the North, such as the Tavayages, the Laitas, Patoca, Icara, and Panis, because he has visited them. He is able to give a most faithful account and also the means to secure them.

5th. The said M. Massé does not demand any recompense except the protection of his Excellency, Monsieur le Viceroy, and to be able to enjoy, he and his dependents, the same advantages as the other subjects of his Majesty, the King of Spain.

Le Sieur Abbé Didier, who asks for the same grace for himself, is able to prove his perfect submission and indefatigable zeal for the growth of God’s domain and of the State of Spain. He will offer every day vows to God all-powerful for the prosperity of his most serene Monseigneur le Viceroy of Mexico, for whom he has the most profound respect.

At Adayes 19th July
1756

The most faithful, the most humble
and the most obedient servant,

Didier, Secular Priest

Note: It is interesting to note that Didier — if Bolton’s transcript is true to the original — renders Massé’s name as I do here with an accent aigu over the “e”. A friend of Massé, Didier presumably would have known how Massé pronounced his name and how to properly render that name in French. In short, Massé apparently did not pronounce his name as MASS or (as I’ve been pronouncing it) MAS-SUH, but MAS-SAY.

La Chute: A Waterfall on Bayou Teche?

2011-12-01T21:49:00.052-06:00

I became aware of claims that a waterfall once emptied into Bayou Teche while examining one of the first extremely accurate maps of Louisiana — Barthélémy Lafon’s "Carte générale du territoire d’Orléans," printed in New Orleans in 1806. On the Teche above New Iberia, and a little upstream from the site of present-day Loreauville, Lafon printed in minuscule type the word "chûtte."

The "chûtte" as shown on Barthélémy Lafon’s

"Carte générale du territoire d’Orléans" (1806).

I've labeled the present-day sites of New Iberia,
Loreauville, and Spanish Lake.
(Source: Library of Congress)

In French chute means "waterfall."

A waterfall on the Teche? In flat coastal south Louisiana?

Later I examined a report on Bayou Teche by former British soldier and spy (and, after switching sides during the American Revolution, official geographer to the fledgling United States) Thomas Hutchins. He had gathered intelligence on the bayou from circa 1772-1784, when Spain, a major rival to the British in nearby West Florida, held much of present-day Louisiana, including the Teche country.

Title page of Hutchins' 1784 book containing
his report on Bayou Teche.

As Hutchins guided his reader up the Teche, he observed:

About 3 leagues above la Nouvelle Iberia [New Iberia] is la Force Point [Fausse Pointe]. . . . Then to la Shute branch, which passes over a fall of about 10 feet, near to where it enters the Tage [Teche] river, it is 3 leagues. . . .

Moreover, Hutchins prepared a hand-drawn map of the Teche, which shows the approximate location of the fall or “shute” (or “shout” as he spells it on the map).

Detail of Hutchins' ca. 1780 map of Bayou Teche
showing the "Shout" (chute). I've labeled New Iberia,
the present-day site of Loreauville, and the Teche itself.
(Source: Author's collection.)

That Lafon and Hutchins both mention the chute and show it at roughly the same location may not, however, be evidence of corroboration. I increasingly believe that Lafon used Hutchins’ report as a source in making his map. (Hutchins’ report and Lafon’s map share a few idiosyncrasies; moreover, Hutchins’ report had been published in 1784 and would have been available to Lafon.)

Enter fellow researcher Don Arceneaux, a native south Louisianian and trained biologist who works in the forests of the northwestern U.S. Don had been looking into the history of the Attakapas region and, as I had, noticed the one or two known references to the chute. But he also found another chute reference, namely, in an early-nineteenth-century land record mentioned in Glenn R. Conrad’s Land Records of the Attakapas District. That land record refers to the chute as sitting on the property of a specific landowner — which allowed Don to pin down more precisely the chute’s location.

In fact, Don believes that modern topographical maps and aerial photographs show the remnant of the chute. And that assumed remnant sits right in the area where the Hutchins, Lafon, and Conrad references said the chute had been located over two centuries ago. The feature in question is no longer a waterfall, its dirt or clay drop (no rock in south Louisiana!) having eroded away or having been removed by human activity. Rather, it is a coulee (our local word for creek) flowing into the Teche from two main branches, one coming from the direction of Spanish Lake to the west and another coming from the neck of land formed by a meander in the Teche near Loreauville.

Topographical map showing the assumed site
of the chute (coulee at middle flowing north into the Teche). (Source: TopoZone.com)

Don theorizes that in the eighteenth century the Teche’s natural levee acted like a dam, turning this jutting neck of land into a bowl that flooded with rainwater during the region’s semitropical downpours. The water found its way through a narrow gap in the levee, and it was there that the chute poured into the Teche.

Interestingly, the word “chute” describes a particular kind of waterfall. According to James R. Penn’s Rivers of the World: A Social, Geographical, and Environmental Sourcebook (2001), a chute is "[a] ‘shortcut’ across a meander bend” or “any narrowing of a channel through which water velocity increases. In this way, water confined by protruding rocks in waterfalls or rapids produces chutes." While it is possible that the chute on the Teche was merely "[a] ‘shortcut’ across a meander bend" (since the assumed spot is indeed on a meander in the Teche), Hutchins, however, recorded that the chute had "a fall of about 10 feet," indicating clearly that it was a waterfall.

Penn is concerned with the modern definition of chute, but what did the word mean in the eighteenth-century? Chute in French literally meant "fall" (as it still does today) and could be used in reference to any number of things. For example, "la chute de l’empire romain" — "the fall of the Roman Empire." But in a hydrographic sense, chute — used primarily in French at the time — did in fact denote a waterfall. In The Royal Dictionary (1773), for example, the English waterfall is translated into French as chute d’eau. Likewise, Le grand dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique (1768) observes, "Waterfall, dans la langue du pays, signifie chute d’eau." ("Waterfall, in the language of the land, signifies chute d’eau.")

Aerial photograph showing assumed site of the chute.
Click image to enlarge. (Source: Google Maps)

Hutchins, by original training a surveyor and cartographer, had explored the former French territories of Illinois and Ohio. As such, he might have known the word chute before traveling to the Gulf Coast around 1772. Along with the word’s local use by francophone Acadians and French Creoles, Hutchins prior knowledge of the term would explain his use of “shute” in his report and on his bilingual (English and French) map of the Teche.

At this point Don and I cannot say for certain that the present-day coulee flowing into the Teche near Loreauville is the remnant of the eighteenth-century chute. But this modern geographic feature seems to us the only clear candidate for the chute.

Don has recently examined the area by kayak, and I plan to go there shortly by canoe.

Addendum (of 1 December 2011):

I think we just solved the puzzle! While examining a digitized U.S. Geological Survey map, I noticed that the USGS provided a name for the present-day coulee that Don has suggested as the chute’s former location. And what does the USGS call the present-day coulee? "Bayou La Chute"!

Screen shot showing the identification of the assumed site
of the chute as "Bayou La Chute" (Source: TopoZone.com)

Can you imagine that? The memory of an over two-hundred-year-old waterfall preserved in the name of a present-day waterway on the same spot!

I think this pretty much closes the case in Don's favor!

Addendum (of 4 December 2011)

Yesterday I canoed to the site of the chute with Keith Guidry and Don Arceneaux. Don had already been to the site six days earlier, but Keith and I had never been there. Actually, Keith had canoed passed it previously, but didn't know its significance at the time.

The entrance to Bayou La Chute and the location
(or approximate location) of the eighteenth-century
waterfall known as "the chute."
(Photo by the author.)

What we saw at the site of the chute was the entrance to a small bayou, about thirty-five feet wide at its mouth, running through a deep cut in the natural ridge that follows the Teche. The banks at this spot are higher than any others I've seen along the Teche, rising about eight to ten feet above the water on the left side of the cut and about three to five feet on the right. A prominent grassy hill or ridge tops the bluff on the right, rising perhaps another twenty-five to thirty feet above the surface of the Teche. One can imagine a chute here two hundred years ago, spilling into the Teche over a drop that at the time connected the high lands to either side of the waterfall.

Heading upstream on Bayou La Chute.
Note the cypress trees and cypress knees
(and someone's fishing chair) on the left bank.
(Photo by the author.)

As mentioned, there is no waterfall at the site today, the drop having eroded away or having been cleared by human activity. As such, one can now canoe directly into the chute's remnant, a waterway called Bayou La Chute, and navigate a fair distance up it and its tributaries. Kevin, Don, and I followed Bayou La Chute for about a quarter mile upstream from the Teche, stopping — though the depth of the water would have permitted us to go farther — only when we reached the fork where the bayou's tributaries turned east onto the neck of the Teche meander and west toward Spanish Lake.

Fork in Bayou La Chute, one heading east (left) onto the neck
of the Teche meander and one heading right (west) toward Spanish Lake.
(Photo by the author.)

Although there is a small amount of garbage, an occasional drainage pipe, and some non-indigenous ornamental bamboo along its banks, Bayou La Chute is otherwise wild in appearance, very beautiful, and well worth diverting from the Teche for a side trip up its narrow, winding course.

Addendum (of 7 December 2011)

As lagniappe here is a detail of an 1846 plat map for the area T12S R7E (just below the Teche) showing the bayou in question as "Bayou La Chute." Its intersection with the Teche does not appear because that feature lies slightly to the north in the next township (T11S R7E).

(Source: Office Of Public Works Plat Map
for District Southwestern T12S R7E [1846],
Louisiana Office of State Lands)

Even better: below is an 1850 copy of a 1795 French-language map of the same area, showing "la chute" as lying on the property of Monsieur Claire Dauterive Dubuclé (Dubuclet) — something Don Arceneaux pointed out to me a couple weeks ago in Conrad's land records book. I only found the below map today, however, in the Louisiana Office of State Lands. (Thanks to Michael Marie for telling me how to search the office's records!) Interestingly, the surveyor who made the original 1795 map was none other than François Gonsoulin, whom I mention in a couple of previous blog articles. By the way, the below map is oriented so that north is to the lower left. (In other words, the map is more or less upside down.)

Map showing "la chute" near the "Rivière Thex" (Teche). Click to enlarge.
(Source: Claim Papers S.W.D. T12S R3-7E, Vol. 24,
Louisiana Office of State Lands [1850 copy of 1795 original])

On That Word “Gumbo”: Okra, Sassafras, and Baudry's Reports from 1802-1803

2011-10-19T17:10:00.042-05:00

As I mentioned in an earlier blog article, some maintain that the word gumbo derives from the African term guingombo, meaning “okra”; while others maintain gumbo comes from the Native American (Choctaw) word kombo ashish, meaning “sassafras.”*

Recently I examined some evidence that in my opinion — for whatever that is worth . . . I am not a linguist — adds weight to the alleged African origin of gumbo. This evidence appears in Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières' late-colonial-era travelogue Second voyage à la Louisiane (Paris: Chez Charles, 1803).

Title page from Baudry's 1803 book.

In one passage Baudry recorded:

Il n'est point de substances adoucissantes employées dans les affections de poitrine, qui, dans les Colonies, soient plus multipliées que celle du Gombeau. C'est une espèce de ketmia; ses fleurs, ses fruits et ses feuilles sont très-adoucissans. Ils sont souvent employés en tisanes et en cataplasmes. Toutes les parties du gombeau entrent dans les ragoûts des naturels des Colonies, et les européens comme les créoles, trouvent dans le fruit de ce petit arbuste, un aliment excellent. M. Dazille le recommande beaucoup aux arrivans d'Europe. C'est le moyen d'éviter les maladies inflammatoires qu'il leur est si difficile d'éviter (page 308).

Which translates as:

There are no soothing substances used in diseases of the chest that in the Colonies are more numerous than the Gombeau. It's a kind of ketmia: Its flowers, fruits and leaves are very soothing. They are often used in teas and poultices. All parts of gombeau are used in the stews of natives of the Colonies, and Europeans as well as Creoles find the fruit of this small shrub an excellent food. Mr. Dazille recommends it very much to arrivals from Europe. This is the way to avoid inflammatory diseases that are so difficult to avoid.

Note that Baudry says that this “Gombeau” is “a kind of ketmia.” Ketmia is a name given by some to okra.

Ketmia as a synonym for okra.
Source: Philip Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary
(London: Self-published by Miller, 1754)

What is interesting about Baudry, therefore, is his reference not to a soup or stew called gombeau, but his reference to a plant, evidently okra, called gombeau — though intriguingly he did mention that this plant was used “dans les ragoûts des naturels des Colonies” . . . in the stews of natives of the Colonies.

This early association of the word gombeau with okra, in my opinion, lends weight to the assertion that gumbo traces its origin to an African term meaning “okra,” as opposed to the Native American term for "sassafras."

Filé (powdered sassafras)
purchased from a modern supermarket.
(Photo by the author)

This etymological issue aside: It's interesting to note that Baudry mentioned in a previous book, Voyage à la Louisiane, et sur le continent de l'Amérique (Paris: Dentu, 1802), the use of filé (powdered sassafras leaves) in gumbo — still a common practice in present-day south Louisiana. Although he did not actually use the term filé, he referred in that book to:

le sassafras, dont les feuilles séchées et réduites en poudre fournissent une espèce de gombeau aromatique vraiment délicieux (page 169).

Or in translation:

sassafras, whose dried and powdered leaves furnish a type of truly delicious aromatic gombeau.

In this instance it appears that gombeau does refer to a soup or stew, into which sassafras would be placed to season and thicken the dish.

The author's personal gumbo recipe.
If you can read it, you can steal it.

Addendum:

Here is yet another, more detailed early reference to gumbo, this one from Observations sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts (1788). This book quotes a certain Monsieur P. de la Coudrenière, author of a short tract titled (in translation) “Observations on the Sassafras, Tree of America”:

The sassafras [tree] or Iroquois laurel is well-known for its aggreable smell & its medicinal properties. . . . [I]n Louisiana, they . . . use its leaves, gathered in July, which are dried until dark & in the open air, and then they pulverize it roughly.

These leaves are used in sauces . . . and give them a pleasant taste. . . . The gummy principal is so sticky that a pinch of this powder is enough to make a viscous broth. This dish is known as American gombo. But we must distinguish this American stew from the one called gombo févi.** The latter is made with the pods of a species of large mauve, known to botanists under the name of sabdariffa [okra]. All parts of this plant contain a viscous juice; and the pods, when they are green, make the water even more sticky than do the leaves of sassafras.

Title page of Observations (1788).

The first time that one eats gombo, one feels a strong repugnance because of this viscosity; but when one tastes it two or three times, the repugnance passes & then one would then wish to eat it everyday, principly with sassafras, which is much tastier than the févi. The Creoles of Louisiana love it so passionately, that they cannot eat any other soup than this one made with broth, pepper, sassafras, & corn or rice cooked in water. Admittedly, this soup is much healthier & better tasting than our soups of bread. They make gombo with all kinds of meat, poultry & fish. They also make it with shrimp & crawfish. That of cabbage is less esteemed; it is eaten, as is that of shrimp, in the evening, and is often served instead of dinner.

We [in France] still do not make use of sassafras; but it is very aromatic, and I think it must have other good qualities, which are perhaps greater than those of the wood and root of this tree. We might also draw oil or wax from its berries, for they are similar to those of the laurel, and contain like them a fatty substance. It is surprising that no attempt has been made to introduce the sassafras on the isle of Corsica & in the southern provinces of France, where it would succeed just as well in Virginia, Florida & Illinois. It is a beautiful tree, and which is always green: indeed, this would free the nation of a tribute it pays annually to the foreigner, to procure this wood, especially since we no longer have Louisiana.

Here is the original French text:

Le sassafras ou laurier des Iroquois est très-connu par son odeur agréable & ses propriétés médicinales. . . . [À] la Louisiane, on se sert . . . de ses feuilles, que l'on cueille en Juillet, que l'on fait sécher à sombre & au grand air, & que l'on pulvérise grossièrement.

Ces feuilles employées dans les sauces . . . & leur donnent un goût agréable. . . . Le principe gommeux qu'elles contiennent est tel, qu'une pincée de cette poudre suffit pour rendre un bouillon visqueux. C'est ce mets que l'on nomme en Amérique gombo. Cependant il faut distinguer ce ragoût américain, de celui qu'on nomme gombo févi. Celui-ci est fait avec les gousses d'une espèce de grande mauve, connue des Botanistes fous le nom des sabdariffa. Toutes les parties de cette plante contiennent un suc visqueux; & les gousses, lorsqu'elles font vertes, rendent l'eau plus gluante encore que ne le font les feuilles de sassafras.

While the author may have erred in his use of the word sabdariffa,
he was not far off the mark: Okra and sabdariffa are both
members of the hibiscus family. Source: David Hosack,
Hortus Elgimensis (New York: T & J. Swords, 1811).

La première fois que l'on mange de ces gombos, on sent une forte de répugnance, à cause de cette viscosité; mais quand on en a goûté deux ou trois fois, la répugnance passe & l'on voudroit ensuite en manger tous les jours, principalement du sassafras, qui est beaucoup plus savoureux que le févi. Les Créoles de la Louisiane l'aiment si passionnément, qu'ils ne peuvent manger d'autre potage que celui qu'ils font avec du bouillon, du piment, du sassafras, & du maïs ou du riz cuit à l'eau. Il faut avouer que ce potage est bien plus sain & bien meilleur au goût que toutes nos soupes de pain. On fait du gombo avec toutes sortes de viandes, de volailles & de poisson. On en fait aussi avec des chevrettes & des écrevisses. Celui de choux est le moins estimé; il se mange, ainsi que celui de chevrette, le soir, & tient souvent lieu de souper.

On ne fait aucun usage de l'encore de sassafras; cependant elle est très aromatique, & je crois qu'elle doit avoir d'autres bonnes qualités, qui peut-être font supérieures à celles du bois & de la racine de cet arbre. On pourroit aussì tirer de l'huile ou de la cire de ses baies; car elles sont semblables à celles du laurier, & contiennent comme elles une substance grasse. Il est surprenant qu'on ne cherche point à naturaliser le sassafras dans l'Isle de Corse & dans les Provinces méridionales de la France, où il réussiroit tout aussi bien qu'en Virginie, à la Floride & aux Illinois. C'est un bel arbre, & qui est toujours vert: d'ailleurs, ce seroit affranchir la Nation d'un tribut qu'elle paie annuellement à l'étranger, pour se procurer ce bois, sur-tout depuis que nous n'avons plus la Louisiane.

________

*See Barry Jean Ancelet, Cajun Country (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 141; Peter H. Wood, Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 55.
**The Dictionary of Louisiana French (2010) defines gombo févi as both "okra" and "okra gumbo" (févi in itself meaning "okra").

Gumbo in 1764?

2011-10-03T17:57:00.041-05:00

The below find is in no way my discovery. The credit goes to Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. . . .

A few weeks ago a friend of mine who is pursuing his Ph.D. at Louisiana State University, and who is writing his dissertation about Cajun foodways, told me that a professor had commented to him, “You probably won't find any historical references to gumbo before 1803 — others have already tried and failed.”

I replied to my friend, “Now that sounds like a challenge.”

Shortly after my friend left, I opened a DVD that I had received in the mail. This DVD contained a videotaped lecture by noted Louisiana colonial historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of, among other books, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Louisiana State University Press, 1992).

Cover of Dr. Hall's book.

As I scanned the DVD, listening to scattered segments of Dr. Hall’s lecture, I caught the words (and I paraphrase Dr. Hall), “And that’s when I found a reference to gumbo from 1764.”

What?

I reversed the video and listened to it again. Yes, that’s what Dr. Hall said. I told my friend about the reference and I e-mailed Dr. Hall herself, asking if she might send me the citation for this reference. She kindly did so, telling me that the original document could be found in the Louisiana Historical Center, headquartered in the old U.S. Mint in New Orleans.

I contacted the Louisiana Historical Center, which is affiliated with the Louisiana State Museum, and asked for a copy of the document. The Center soon sent me a scan of the original handwritten manuscript, the section of which mentioning gumbo I show here (with the phrase "un gombeau" highlighted):

Source: Interrogation of Julia (Comba), 4 September 1764,
Records of the French Superior Council,
Louisiana Historical Center, New Orleans, La.
(Click to enlarge image)

Here is a transcript of the passage:

[Interrogator:] Si elle ne luÿ [lui] avoir pas donné un gombeau avec Cezar et une autre negresse.

[Comba:] A dit qu'ouÿ [qu'oui] cela etait vraÿ [vrai] qu'ils étaient quatre [scratched out] que Cezar méme [même] donne à Loüis cinquante sols pour aller chercher le filer qu'il ÿ fut et buveur tout ensembles.

This passage translates as follows:

[Interrogator:] [I asked] If she hadn't given him [Louis] a gombeau [sic] with Cezar and another black woman?

[Comba:] [She] Said yes it was true that there were four [people]. That Cezar himself gave Louis 50 sols [French monetary units or coins] to find the liquor and that there was drinking all together.

About the word “filer”: Dr. Hall told me she thinks this word is actually “filet”. At first I thought Dr. Hall meant “filé” (powdered sassafras leaves used for seasoning and thickening gumbo). However, she actually did mean “filet” — not in the sense of “meat,” but rather “drink” (liquor), which is indeed a meaning of “filet” in Louisiana French.* It thus appears to me that the colonial-era writer meant “filet” but spelled it phonetically as “filer”.

Now some context: This September 4, 1764, document is part of an interrogation of a fifty-year-old female slave named Julia, also known as Comba, whose owner was a certain “Sr. [Sieur] Cantrelle.” Comba was being questioned regarding her knowledge of a runaway slave named Louis, also known as Foy, allegedly involved with other slaves, including one named Cezar, in thefts of clothing and a pig.

The significance of this passage is that it pushes back the earliest known reference to gumbo to 1764 — indicating that the dish was known in Louisiana even before the arrival of the Acadian exiles, whose Cajun descendants (unjustly or not) are the ethnic group most often associated with gumbo by the general public. Of course, this finding is perhaps not so surprising to those who maintain that the word “gumbo” came from the African term for “okra,” or, as others maintain, from a Native American word for “sassafras.” (I have no dog in that fight.)

A bowl of gumbo as prepared in New Orleans.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

How this 1764 gumbo was made, however, and what ingredients went into it, is an open question. Did it contain a roux? If so, was it light or dark? Was it seafood gumbo, or chicken and sausage, or something altogether different and unexpected?

Regardless, thanks to Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall for making and sharing this discovery; and thanks to the Louisiana Historical Center for providing scans of the original documents.

Pods of okra. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Addendum: Playing devil's advocate, a friend suggested that perhaps the interrogator used the word “gombeau” to mean not “gumbo” but “okra.” Assuming for the moment that “gumbo" does derive from the African word for “okra” (as opposed to the Indian word for "sassafras" or some other source), it would nonetheless make little sense for the interrogator to ask, “If she hadn't given him an okra [un gombeau] with Cezar and another black woman?” After all, this interpretation would suggest that Comba gave Louis, Cezar, and the other black woman a single pod of okra — an odd thing to do, since a decent-sized okra pod is about the size of an adult finger and as such would not have lent itself to being shared by four people. Moreover, this interpretation would require the interrogator to have known and intended the original African meaning of “gumbo.” While possible, I think it more likely that the interrogator meant some kind of soup dish. Again, however, I don't think we can know how closely this dish would have resembled what we today call gumbo.

________

*“Filet [filε, file] n.m. drink, shot (of liquor). . . .” Source: Dictionary of Louisiana French (University Press of Mississippi, 2010).

La Pointe de Repos — Early Acadian Settlement Site along the Teche

2011-09-03T18:21:00.006-05:00

For my own understanding as much as anything else, I post the following information regarding the location of La Pointe de Repos. Situated along Bayou Teche, this place served as an early settlement site for Acadian exiles who arrived in the Spanish colony of Louisiana in 1765.

First, I display a ca. 1771 hand-drawn map by Attakapas District surveyor François Gonsoulin showing La Pointe de Repos (literally The Point of Rest) and the names of exiles who settled there.

La Pointe de Repos, from a ca. 1771 map by
surveyor François Gonsoulin. (Source: Library of Congress)

Note the map reads "Riviere Thex" (now called Bayou Teche) and "Quartier de La Pointe du Repos" (Area of La Pointe du Repos). Gonsoulin, however, did not place this stretch of the Teche in context — in other words, for all we know it could lie anywhere along the one-hundred-thirty-mile bayou.

The names of the settlers shown on Gonsoulin's map are (from left to right) Aman Thibodeau, Paul Thibodeau, François Guilbeau, Michel Bernard, Simon LeBlanc, Charles Guilbeau, Mary Guilbeau veuve (widow) Babineau, Sylvain Broussard, and the Widow Ducrest (née Wils [Wiltz]).

I now post a detail from Gertrude Taylor's 1979 reconstruction titled "Land Grants along the Teche" (issued by the Attakapas Historical Association in cooperation with the Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette).

Detail of Gertrude Taylor's "Land Grants along the Teche"
(Lafayette, La.: Attakapas Historical Association/
Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1979).

Importantly, Taylor did not use Gonsoulin’s map as a source when compiling her reconstructed map, but relied on other documents.

Note that Taylor's reconstruction shows the same setters (with one exception) that appear on Gonsoulin’s map and that she places them near a bend in Bayou Teche just above present-day Parks, Louisiana. The settlers are, from north to south, Aman Thibodeau, Paul Thibodeaux, François Guilbeau, Michael (Michel) Bernard, Simon Leblanc, Francois Guilbeau, Charles Babineau, and Armand Ducrest. Only Sylvain Broussard is missing.

Regardless, the evidence (that is, the corresponding names and matching contours on both maps) is sufficient to show that La Pointe de Repos sat on the Teche just above Parks.

In actuality, my research digs up nothing new. As Carl Brasseaux wrote in Founding of New Acadia (1987), "Ascending the Teche to the large westward bend above present-day Parks, these . . . [Acadian exiles] founded a settlement they christened La Pointe de Repos."

It's helpful for me, however, to see Brasseaux’s findings reflected in these two maps created about two-hundred years apart.

A 1795 Journey up the Teche: Fact, Fiction, or Literary Hoax?

2011-08-30T13:26:00.028-05:00

In 1889 famed Louisiana author George Washington Cable published his book Strange True Stories of Louisiana.

Among its pages Cable included two letters, translated from their original French, which documented a 1795 journey by boat from New Orleans to St. Martinville, Louisiana, via the Mississippi River, Bayou Plaquemine, the Atchafalaya swamp, and Bayou Teche.

Title page from Cable's book.

As I read the two letters, however, I grew increasingly suspicious about their authenticity. I suspected that they were fakes — that is, that they were works of fiction probably written by Cable himself.

The letters bothered me as a historian. I wanted to use them as primary-source material, but I could not so long as I suspected their authenticity.

Cable professed his own suspicions about the letters. In particular, he noted the presence of anachronisms (objects out of place in time). Yet he explained them away like so:

Whoever made this copy [of the original letters] it remains still so simple and compact that he or she cannot be charged with many embellishments. And yet it is easy to believe that some one, with that looseness of family tradition and largeness of ancestral pride so common among the Creoles, in half-knowledge and half-ignorance should have ventured aside for an instant to attribute in pure parenthesis to an ancestral de La Houssaye the premature honor of a San Domingan war; or, incited by some tradition of the old Minister's intimate friendship with Madelaine's family, should have imputed a gracious attention to the wrong Count de Maurepas, or to the wrong count altogether. . . . I find no other theory tenable. To reject the whole matter as a forgery flies into the face of more incontestable facts than the anachronisms do.

So Cable himself acknowledged the anachronisms, but dismissed them as minor, innocent embellishments by a later copyist.

George Washington Cable.

I believe there may be other anachronisms — that is, ones unidentified by Cable — which I will discuss some other time. (See addendum below.)

Besides these anachronisms, I suspected the letters' authenticity because of their romantic literary style, so typical of nineteenth-century literature. And the letters included dialogue rendered in a literary format, such as found in novels or short stories. Take, for example, this passage from the letters:

While Suzanne admired herself in the mirror I took her place. My headdress differed from hers in the ends of my feathers being blue, and in the rose being white, surrounded by pale blue violets and a few silver leaves. And now a temptation came to all of us. Alix spoke first:

"Now put on your ball-dresses and I will send for our friends. What do you think?"

"Oh, that would be charming!" cried Suzanne. "Let us hurry!" And while we dressed, Pat, always prowling about the cottage, was sent to the flatboat to get his parents and the Carlos, and to M. Gerbeau's to ask my father and M. and Mme. Gerbeau to come at once to the cottage. . . . No, I cannot tell the cries of joy that greeted us. The children did not know us, and Maggie had to tell Pat over and over that these were Miss Souzie and Miss Francise. My father's eyes filled with tears as he thanked Alix for her goodness and generosity to us.

Alas! the happiest days, like the saddest, have an end. On the morrow the people in the flatboat came to say good-bye. Mario cried like a child. Celeste carried Alix's hands to her lips and said in the midst of her tears:

"O Madame! I had got so used to you — I hoped never to leave you."

This flowery sentimentalism struck me as hardly the sort of thing one would find in a letter written on the south Louisiana frontier.

An illustration of one of the letters, from Cable's book.

In addition, my suspicion stemmed from Cable's own elaborate efforts, both in his introduction and footnotes, to convince readers that the documents in question were authentic. Why would he assume, I wondered, that readers would not believe him? Indeed, as purely historical documents the letters, although possibly useful to my own research, are hardly remarkable. They aren't the Dead Sea Scrolls, after all, or some newly discovered medieval translation of an otherwise lost Greek manuscript — they are merely an account of a journey from New Orleans to St. Martinville, of which many (albeit not from so early a time) were published in mid- to late 19th century newspapers and magazines. So it seems to me a case of Cable "protesting too much."

A typical page from Cable's book,
showing a passage from the old letters.

Finally, the very source of the letters heightened my suspicion. Cable eventually identified this source, noting in his book:

The manuscript seemed genuine. Maybe the name De Morainville is not, but was a convenient fiction of Alix herself, well understood as such by Francoise and Suzanne. Everything points that way, as was suggested at once by Madame Sidonie de La Houssaye — There! I have let slip the name of my Creole friend, and can only pray her to forgive me! [My italics.]

Cable further explained how de La Houssaye came into possession of the letters:

So a correspondence sprang up with a gentle and refined old Creole lady [de La Houssaye] with whom I later had the honor to become acquainted and now count among my esteemed friends — grand-daughter of the grandmother who, after innumerable recountings by word of mouth to mother, sisters, brothers, friends, husband, children, and children's children through twenty-seven years of advancing life, sat down at last and wrote the oft-told tale for her little grand-children, one of whom, inheriting her literary instinct and herself become an aged grandmother, discovers the manuscript among some old family papers and recognizes its value.

Another illustration of the letters, from Cable's book.

It is important to note, however, that Sidonie de La Houssaye was herself a writer, composing short stories and novellas in Louisiana French. Among her published works are Contes d'une grand-mère louisianaise (Stories of a Louisiana Grandmother) Pouponne et Balthazar (Pouponne and Balthazar), and Les Quarteronnes de La Nouvelle Orléans (The Quadroons of New Orleans).

Significantly, de La Houssaye often made use in her works of the "found manuscript" literary device. As de La Houssaye scholar Robin White of Nicholls State University informed me by e-mail, "SdLH makes things up . . . that's what she does . . . her special line is, 'I found these old papers in a trunk.'"

Sidonie de La Houssaye (digitally enhanced).

Moreover, de La Houssaye, born and reared in south Louisiana, possessed both the French literary skills and local historical knowledge required to create the letters — which in fact mention de La Houssaye's ancestors, as well as other "real-life" persons, in addition to those who seem to be imaginary.

All of the above, however, proves nothing. It's mere circumstantial evidence.

Recently, however, I learned that Louisiana State University had digitized de La Houssaye's papers and made them available online. Thinking some of the documents might pertain to the letters, or even be the letters themselves, I examined the collection over the Internet. While the collection did not contain the letters — nor did the Cable collection at Tulane, incidentally — it did possess an unpublished manuscript by de La Houssaye titled "Georges Gérard," which in some respects bears a resemblance to the "old letters" in Cable's Strange True Stories of Louisiana. Like the letters, this unpublished novella concerns a voyage by boat from New Orleans to St. Martinville. Likewise, it features a character named "Captain Patterson," just as do the letters.

Again, this proves nothing, but further examination of "Georges Gérard" may yield additional clues that could determine the authenticity of the letters.

Importantly, however, if de La Houssaye did write the letters that appear in Cable's book, I think crucial questions would be "Did Cable know she wrote them? And if he did not, would this constitute a literary hoax (albeit a harmless one) on de La Houssaye's part?"

I share the above as a work-in-progress, since this is after all a blog and not a peer-review academic journal or university press. As such, I reserve the right to recant my assertions! I plan to include additional findings here as I become aware of them.

An addendum concerning anachronisms: One anachronism I have identified in the letters is a reference to the voyagers stopping at the bayou-side home of prominent real-life planter Agricole Fuslier. Choosing for unknown reasons to paraphrase that passage of the letter, Cable notes, "The travelers found, of course, a charmante cordialite at the home of M. Agricole Fuselier. . . ."

This event presumably occurred somewhere just up the bayou from the future site of Franklin, Louisiana, for the letters' author had just mentioned the boat reaching a point "about two miles from where Franklin was to be." This would be geographically accurate, for although Agricole Fuselier's home stands today along the Teche near Jeanerette, prior to around 1960 it stood farther down the Teche near Baldwin, not too far from Franklin.

However, it should be remembered that the letters claim to document events that took place in 1795 — but Agricole Fuselier did not build his home on the Teche until 1816.

Agricole Fuselier's house as it appears today, near Jeanerette, La.
(Photo by the author, 2011)

As historian Glenn R. Conrad noted, "A few months after his marriage, Agricole acquired . . . his first piece of property, a farm facing Bayou Tortue and backing on Bayou Cypress . . . [located] between St. Martinville and Broussard. . . . It was here, on the fertile lands of St. Martin Parish that Agricole and his wife established their first home. . . ."

This home stood a few miles southeast of the Lafayette Regional Airport, and thus nowhere near the site along the Teche mentioned in the letters.

Professor Conrad adds, "Fuselier [later] decided to move his family from Bayou Tortue to St. Mary Parish [i.e, to the site on Bayou Teche]. That move took place sometime in the sixteen-month period between August 1815 and January 1817. It is fair to say, then, that Fuselier's new home . . . was constructed during 1816." [My italics.]

In other words, Agricole owned no land and had no house on Bayou Teche in 1795, and indeed would not until 1815 or afterwards, at least twenty years later. Thus the author of the letters would not have been able to experience "a charmante cordialite at the home of M. Agricole Fuselier" as she went up the Teche near the future site of Franklin.

[Source: Glenn R. Conrad, "A Lady Called Alice," Attakapas Gazette XIII (Fall 1978): pp. 125-28.]

All the Same Place: Isla Cuarin, Côte de Coiron, Île Petite Anse, Petite Anse Island & Avery Island

2011-07-10T16:48:00.012-05:00

I recently stumbled on a historical mystery while examining the online inventory of the Historic New Orleans Collection. Going through its list of documents concerning the Attakapas region (south-central Louisiana), I noticed a reference to a 1799 survey map of an otherwise unidentified place called Isla Cuarin.

The name "Isla Cuarin" struck me as similar to "Côte de Coiron," which a former professor and mentor of mine, the late historian Glenn R. Conrad, once claimed — unconvincingly, it seemed to me at the time — was synonymous with Île Petite Anse or Petite Anse Island, known from the late nineteenth century onward as Avery Island, Louisiana. (See Conrad, Land Records of the Attakapas District, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, p. 86.)

Avery Island is a rolling, verdant salt dome located in lower Iberia Parish, Louisiana. It is home to a massive working salt mine, the sprawling semitropical estate known as Jungle Gardens, the private wildfowl refuge known as Bird City, and world-famous Tabasco brand pepper sauce (for whom I work as historian and curator).

A photograph I took of Avery Island in 2006
for Wikipedia's article about the geographic oddity.
(Source: Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons.)

Intrigued, I asked the Historic New Orleans Collection for a copy of the Isla Cuarin survey map. When the map arrived in the mail, I examined it immediately, but did not recognize the amorphous hand-drawn landmark in the survey.

I realized, however, that the surveyor had not oriented the map in the modern way, with north facing toward the top of the page; rather, he oriented the map with east facing toward the top.

Adjusting the orientation, I saw that the landmark in question did indeed look very much like Avery Island.

A comparison of the 1799 map of "Isla Cuarin" (left)
with an 1810 map of Avery Island (formerly Petite Anse Island).
(Sources: Historic New Orleans Collection; Avery Island, Inc., Archives.)

The more I examined the document, the more evidence I found to confirm this impression. For example, the map showed not an "isla" (island) in the traditional sense (a land mass surrounded by open water), but, rather, a landlocked geographical feature — just as Avery Island is landlocked, sitting about three miles inland from the nearest body of open water.

In addition, the course of the waterway called "Bayou des Petite Cote" on the 1799 map corresponded to the course of Bayou Petite Anse, the name of the bayou that encircles Avery Island. Likewise, the courses of other, lesser bayous on the map corresponded to those that meander around the perimeter of Avery Island.

The 1799 map identified a "cipriera" off the east side of the island, just as there has been a cypress swamp on the east side of Avery Island for as long as anyone can remember.

Moreover, the 1799 map identified a "praderia temblenta" (trembling prairie — that is, waterlogged prairie that trembles when disturbed) north of the island. Such a prairie did exist near Avery Island, having been written about by explorers as early as 1779 and later by the interrelated Avery/McIlhenny family that owns the Island.

The 1799 map gave the area of Isla Cuarin as 2,050 arpents (an arpent being an ancient French unit of measurement that is still sometimes used in Louisiana). This is approximately the same size as Avery Island. Indeed, an 1810 map of Avery Island gave the landmark's area as 2,074.75 arpents — a figure not terribly different for a period using inexact measuring tools to estimate the size of a land mass with fluctuating borders (according to the rise and fall of adjacent bayous, swamps, and marsh waters).

Most convincingly, however, the 1799 survey referred to an early land claimant named "Santyago Fontenet," which is the Spanish name of Jacques Fontenette ("Santyago" and "Jacques" both being forms of Jacob), an actual early owner of Avery Island. The other claimant listed in the survey, Carlos Olivier Deverin, is no doubt Charles Olivier Devezin, who founded Olivier Plantation about seven miles from Avery Island — in fact, what I read as an "r" on the 1799 map may well be a "z".

Satellite image of Avery Island, ca. 2010. (Source: Google Maps.)

For these reasons I believe the survey map of Isla Cuarin shows what was known for most of the nineteenth century as Île Petite Anse or Petite Anse Island and what is now known as Avery Island — making this 1799 map the earliest known map of Avery Island, and the only known map of the Island from the colonial period.

So it turns out Professor Conrad was right!

But why was Avery Island called "Isla Cuarin" and "Côte de Coiron" in the first place? Conrad suggested that the French word "Coiron" (spelled "Cuarin" by the Spanish) was a surname. A companion document in the Historic New Orleans Collection bears out Conrad's suggestion, referring to Isla Cuarin's owner as "Dr. Cuarin." While I have found no other references to Cuarin in colonial papers, there was an Antoine Coiron who owned land elsewhere in Attakapas during the same period. Is he the same person as "Dr. Cuarin"? Who knows, but I hope to find out.

The Grevembergs, Early Cattle Ranchers of the Attakapas

2011-05-14T19:10:00.034-05:00

Eighteenth-century colonists in south Louisiana’s Attakapas region commonly raised cattle, not only to feed themselves, but to feed the lower Louisiana colony in general and New Orleans in particular. An important source of information about this early cattle industry is the historical document known as The Brand Book for the Opelousas and Attakapas Districts. The original is located in the Jefferson Caffery Louisiana Room of Dupré Library at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Nineteenth-century engraving of a south Louisiana cattle rancher.
(Source: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline
[NY: John B. Alden, 1892].)

Researchers are fond of citing The Brand Book’s earliest entry as proof that cattle ranching in Louisiana extended back as early as the 1730s. The entry in question is the brand registration for Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg, colonists of Flemish ancestry who settled around present-day New Iberia.

As Maurine Bergerie writes in They Tasted Bayou Water: A Brief History of Iberia Parish (1962), “Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg registered their brand in 1739. . . .” Likewise, William Faulkner Rushton observes in The Cajuns: From Acadia to Louisiana (1979), “Louisiana’s cattle industry goes back at least to 1739, the date the first cattle brand was recorded in the state’s French ‘brand book.’”

However, I think 1739 is incorrect.

I have no doubt that The Brand Book reads “1739,” but I think this date is a mistake — perhaps a simple careless error made by an anonymous scribe in the course of copying and recopying The Brand Book.

Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg's cattle brand entries
in The Brand Book, dated "1739." (Click to enlarge.)
(Source: Jefferson Caffery Louisiana Room, Dupré Library,
University of Louisiana at Lafayette.)

I am not the first to suspect an error. As folklorist Lauren C. Post noted in The McNeese Review academic journal (1958):

As might be expected, with a long succession of brand recorders working over a period of sixty-four years and for a period which extended over 128 years, the work had many inconsistencies. At least, there appear to be inconsistencies. One page . . . shows that Louis Grevemberg registered his 5F brand in 1737. In another place the same book shows that he registered the same brand in 1739. The book for 1760-1888 listed Louis Grevemberg as registering the 5F brand on October 14, 1793.

Besides these inconsistencies noted by Post, I believe the 1739 (and 1737) date to be incorrect for the following reasons:

First, a glance at other early entries in The Brand Book reveals no others from the 1730s. Indeed, except for a couple of entries from the late 1740s (which I also find suspect), the mass of registered brands date from the 1760s and later, when settlement of the Attakapas District finally began in earnest.

Detail of a sample page from The Brand Book. (Source: Photo of
facsimile in The African American Museum, St. Martinville, La.)

Second, there is no evidence that the brothers Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg were in the Attakapas District before 1770, when Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg (presumably their father) received a Spanish land grant in the region. (France gave Louisiana to Spain in 1762, explaining why Jean-Baptiste received not a French but a Spanish land grant in 1770.) Indeed, Louis and Barthélémy only received land grants for themselves in the region in 1774 and 1781, respectively.

Finally (and most convincingly), Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg were born, respectively, in 1731 and 1753 — which means that Louis would have been only six to eight years old when his brands were allegedly registered; and that Barthélémy’s brands would have been registered fourteen to sixteen years before his own birth!

For these reasons I do not believe that Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg registered cattle brands in the Attakapas District in 1737 and 1739. Rather, I think it most likely that Louis and Barthélémy registered their brands some time after their father received his Attakapas land grant in 1770, or after they received their own land grants in the region a few years later. Indeed, as Post observed, The Brand Book does refer to Louis Grevemberg registering a brand in 1793, even while it also refers to him doing so allegedly in 1737 and 1739.

Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg's cattle brand entries
in The Brand Book, dated "1793" (Click to enlarge.)
(Source: Jefferson Caffery Louisiana Room, Dupré Library,
University of Louisiana at Lafayette.)

However, there is one (I think minor) flaw in my assertion — that is, Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg had a grandfather named Barthélémy (born ca. 1685 in Flanders, Belgium). One could therefore argue that it was this earlier Barthélémy Grevemberg who registered his brand in the 1730s. This seems unlikely, however, because, again, there is no other evidence that the Grevembergs — or any other colonists, not even the intrepid André Masse — had settled in the Attakapas region so early. Moreover, such a counterargument would still not account for the alleged registering of Louis Grevemberg's brand in 1737/1739.

An addendum concerning the identity of Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg: In 1779 a colonist by this name rendered enormous assistance to the founders of Nueva Iberia (present-day New Iberia). I believe that this Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg was a brother of Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg, but have yet to prove this link. He clearly was not Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg, father of Louis and Barthélémy Grevemberg, for colonial records indicate that their father had died by 19 June 1772.

Signature of Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg, who assisted the Nueva Iberia colony, 1779. (Source: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.)

A related note: In his book Changing Tides: Twilight and Dawn in the Spanish Sea, 1763-1803 (1995), historian Robert S. Weddle identifies this same Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg as “Jean Baptiste Grevemberg dit Gonsoulin” — that is, Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg nicknamed Gonsoulin. But this is incorrect: Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg actually bore the same nickname as the other males of his family, which was “dit Flammand,” a reference to the family’s Flemish roots.

Gonsoulin, on the other hand, was an entirely different colonist. His full name was François Gonsoulin and he often worked as a surveyor in the Attakapas region.

Signature of François Gonsoulin, 1779. (Source: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.)

Sources:

Maurine Bergerie, They Tasted Bayou Water: A Brief History of Iberia Parish (New Orleans, La.: Pelican, 1962).

Rev. Donald J. Hebert, Southwest Lousiana Records, Vols. 1 and 2, s.v. "Grevemberg."

Lauren C. Post, "Cattle Branding in Southwest Louisiana," The McNeese Review X (1958): 101-117.

William Faulkner Rushton, The Cajuns: From Acadia to Louisiana (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1979).

Tracking the Decline of Cajun French

2011-03-22T21:07:00.009-05:00

The history of the Cajuns in the twentieth century often touches on the subject of language — that is, the decline of Cajun French as more and more young Cajuns learned to speak English as their first and often their only language. As I wrote in my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People

As I grew older, I became increasingly aware of the cultural rift between [my Bernard family’s] generations. How was it, I wondered, that after more than three hundred years in the New World, our family had suddenly lost the ability to speak French? What had occurred between my generation and that of my grandparents to bring about this significant change?

Americanization, I asserted, is what had occurred. And that Americanization was spurred along, more than any other factor, by the punishment of Cajun children for speaking French at school. As I noted:

The consequences [of punishment] were disastrous for Cajun French, pushing the dialect to the brink of extinction. For the first time [1946-1950], a minority of the ethnic group's children spoke French as their primary language. The percentage would plummet to 21 percent for those born between 1956 and 1960, a woeful decline from the 83 percent for Cajuns born at the dawn of the century. . . . [Furthermore] Among Cajuns born between 1966 and 1970 . . . only about 12 percent grew up speaking French as their primary language; for those born between 1971 and 1975, the figure dropped to about 8 percent.

I arrived at these figures by using census data — in particular, Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS), available mainly to scholars through academic institutions. PUMS offers raw census data extrapolated from 5 percent of households in specific geographic regions.

In my case, I used PUMS data to track the decline of Cajun French throughout the twentieth century. This is shown in the below chart, which I made in the 1990s and now publish for the first time.

A word of caution:

The chart does not measure the percentage of Cajuns who spoke French in any given year. It does, however, measure the percentage of Cajuns who spoke French as their first language in 1990 according to their dates of birth (broken into five-year age groups).

So the chart reveals, for example, that for the five-year age group born between 1921 and 1925, approximately 76% spoke French as their first language in 1990.

(Some may wonder why I placed the dark vertical line denoting the start of the World War II era with the 1936-40 age group and not the 1941-45 age group. I did this because children born in the mid- to late 1930s would not have exhibited linguistic traits until they actually began to speak and they would not have exhibited permanent linguistic traits until they entered school at age five or six — and by that time the US would have entered World War II.)

The Secret CODOFIL Papers

2011-03-13T17:09:00.024-05:00

In the mid-1990s I interviewed Cajun activist and educator Richard Guidry (d. 2008), who at one time worked for the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) — an organization founded by the state of Louisiana in 1968 “to do any and all things necessary to accomplish the development, utilization and preservation of the French language as found in the state of Louisiana for the cultural, economic and tourist[ic] benefit of the state.”

Today CODOFIL primarily helps to administer French education programs in Louisiana’s public school system.

During our interview, Guidry informed me that when he worked at CODOFIL a colleague confessed to him that she had been recruited by the FBI to infiltrate the organization. Her mission, she claimed, was to determine if CODOFIL was subversive. This notion will seem absurdly humorous to anyone who knows CODOFIL, which is hardly subversive. Innocuous, even conservative (politically and otherwise) during its infancy — but not subversive. One might as well suspect the Daughters of the American Revolution of subversion. I exaggerate only slightly.

As a historian trained to be skeptical, I neither believed nor disbelieved Guidry, though I did find his claim interesting. As such, I wrote to the FBI to request, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), any documents it possessed concerning CODOFIL or its early president, former U.S. Congressman James "Jimmy" Domengeaux.

Two years later, in 1998, the FBI sent me twenty-seven pages of documents concerning Domengeaux.

Cover page of Domengeaux-related documents
sent to me by the FBI.

None of these documents, however, mentioned CODOFIL. Indeed, all twenty-seven pages predated CODOFIL’s origin. And while a cover letter noted that the FBI had never maintained a file on Domengeaux, the bureau had nonetheless located these Domengeaux-related documents in files pertaining to other subjects.

Those twenty-seven pages contained a hodgepodge of information: A request to investigate policemen who allegedly violated the civil rights of campaign volunteers working for Domengeaux’s brother; an appeal by Domengeaux to locate an individual who drove a US government vehicle involved in a traffic accident; an NAACP document accusing the former congressman of “racebaiting.”

Civil Rights complaint filed in 1956 by Domengeaux
on behalf of "a well-known 'winehead.'" (FBI Archives)

I wondered, however, why the FBI had chosen to withhold from me four additional pages of documents?

Granted, the bureau’s cover letter explained that it withheld these four pages because, among lesser reasons, they had been “specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”

To be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy? What, had Domengeaux stumbled on America’s plans for the D-Day invasion of Normandy? After all, he left elected public office in the 1940s.

Request by Domengeaux in 1958 for information
on the driver of a US government vehicle
involved in an accident. (FBI Archives)

I appealed the FBI’s decision to withhold the documents — under President Clinton, under President Bush — each round of appeals taking years and never meeting with success. I was neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post, nor could I afford legal representation. “Appeal” simply meant writing letters to the FBI saying “I appeal your decision” and then waiting for an answer.

In early 2009 I again appealed the decision, but this time a new factor seemed as though it might work in my favor: Newly sworn-in President Barack Obama had issued a memorandum instructing “All agencies . . . [to] adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government.” The President added, “The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.”

NAACP document from 1948 accusing
Domengeaux of "race-baiting." (FBI Archives)

In response to my new appeal citing the President's instructions, the FBI released the four previously withheld pages — thirteen years after I first appealed the bureau’s decision to withhold them.

And what were these documents so vital to “national defense or foreign policy”?

Well, one of them was a clipping of a 1992 article from the French Canadian newspaper Le Devoir. That’s right — a newspaper article that anyone had been free to read since publication. The article, about a 1970 government report on the French Canadian separatist movement, made no reference to Domengeaux or CODOFIL, but it bore the intriguing title (and I translate), “CIA Also Monitoring the Acadians."

Le Devoir article about the CIA monitoring
Acadians in Canada (30 December 1992). (FBI Archives)

By “Acadians” the article did not mean Louisiana Cajuns, but their long-lost cousins in French Canada. Indeed, the only reference to Cajuns appeared toward the end of the article, when its author stated, “While many Acadians [around 1970] — including Premier of New Brunswick Louis Robichaud — were opposed to the separation [of French Canada from the rest of the nation], many others saw in the independence process an opportunity to get money [from France, I presume] to ‘develop cultural links with these original Acadians living in Maine, Massachusetts and Louisiana.’. . .” [My italics.]

Another previously withheld “secret” document (and it really was stamped “secret”) concerned Congressman Domengeaux’s 1946 request to the federal government that a French diplomat, not he, award the Order of the French Army to a south Louisiana veteran “because of his work in organizing the Maquis” (the French Resistance in World War II).

Domengeaux is mentioned toward the middle of this
1946 document in reference to a south Louisiana veteran
who was to receive a French medal. (FBI Archives)

(The FBI redacted the name of the US serviceman to receive this award. I showed the document to my acquaintance, General Robert LeBlanc of Abbeville, Louisiana, who not only had been a Domengeaux constituent, but during World War II had joined the OSS and crossed Nazi lines in France to aid the Maquis. General LeBlanc thus believed that the name redacted by the FBI was probably his own. While he did not receive the “Order of the French Army” (l’Ordre de l’Armée Française), LeBlanc had been nominated by France for the Croix de Guerre. He never received the citation, however, because of his untimely reassignment to China.)

Interestingly, one of the previously withheld pages made reference to something called the “GUARD RAIL investigation” and bore the stamp “TOP SECRET / GUARD RAIL.”

I subsequently asked the FBI for information about GUARD RAIL, but it replied that nothing could be found on the subject.

Document from 1976 that twice mentions
"GUARD RAIL," whatever that is. (FBI Archives)

It is interesting to me, however, that in response to my request for papers concerning CODOFIL and Domengeaux, the FBI should first withhold and then send me this document about something called the “GUARD RAIL investigation.” I say this because although the document in question made no reference to CODOFIL or Domengeaux (as far as I was permitted to see), the FBI nonetheless associated GUARD RAIL with these two subjects — otherwise it would not have sent me the document. Of course, it’s possible that GUARD RAIL had nothing to do with CODOFIL or Domengeaux and that the FBI merely sent me the document by mistake. Who knows?

This undated page mentions neither Domengeaux nor CODOFIL,
but it does demonstrate that positive-thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale
took his marching orders from Joseph Goebbels. (FBI Archives.)

So, what does all this mean? Does it mean that CODOFIL was a subversive organization or that the FBI once infiltrated it?

No, it just means that the FBI was sitting on a bunch of fairly mundane papers that ultimately were of no real use to me as a historian. Regardless, they are interesting and I post a selection of them here for examination.

The Elusive André Masse, Pioneer of the Attakapas

2011-02-21T14:32:00.025-06:00

Many researchers of the Teche region know the name André Masse: He was an early, if not the earliest, European pioneer of the Attakapas District of Louisiana (that is, south-central Louisiana). Unfortunately, a good deal of misinformation surrounds Masse’s place of residence.

In his voluminous Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas (1812), the Spanish cleric José Antonio Pichardo placed the French settler along the Sabine River, or, as he put it, “next to a river . . . call[ed] . . . the Adaes [Río de los Adays], or Mexicano — and which is [also called] the Sabinas. . . .”

Confusingly, Pichardo also quotes the Spanish governor of Texas, Navarrete (1759-1767), who wrote that Masse’s dwelling stood “[T]o this [east] side of the Río de los Adaes [Sabine River], and before coming to the little Río de las Flores. . . .” The Spanish cleric Morfi echoed this claim in his Memorias para la Historia de Texas (ca. 1781).

About the location of this Río de las Flores: Pichardo stated that he did not refer to the larger waterway of the same name found in Texas. Rather, he referred to a smaller Río de las Flores, which he associated with Bayu de Agua Salada and Río de los Lobos, small waterways that emptied in the Gulf of Mexico on either side of Encinal del Tigre (present-day Chênière au Tigre, Louisiana). The encinal (a Spanish term for a clump of oak trees) stood a short distance west of the Río Bermellon (Vermilion River).

Pichardo's 1811 map of the south Louisiana coast
showing Bayu de Agua Salada, Río de Lobos,
and other geographic features.

This would place Masse in or near present-day coastal Vermilion Parish, Louisiana — which, although in the Attakapas District, is farther west than Masse’s actual documented place of residence, near Bayou Teche.

It seems clear to me, however, that Pichardo — writing decades after Masse’s death — did not really know where Masse had resided. Was it along the Sabine on the present-day Louisiana-Texas border? Or was it in or near present-day Vermilion Parish?

Likewise, in more recent times Robert S. Weddle stated in his book The French Thorn that Masse established a Texas rancheria on the Río de Angelina or its parent river, the Río de Neches. Weddle based his conclusion, however, solely on inaccurate claims by Spanish explorer Bernardo de Miranda — who so distorted his map of the Louisiana and Texas coasts that even the Viceroy of New Spain dismissed the illustration at the time (1757) as not “subject to the rules of geography.”

In short, the map expressed wishful thinking on Miranda's part. It showed Spanish-held Texas stretching all the way to the Mississippi River. As a result, the Río de Angelina, which in reality runs north of Beaumont/Port Arthur, Texas, appears on Miranda’s map as if it ran through south-central Louisiana!

Miranda's 1757 map of "Texas" with red square
around Masse's house. Map source: Research Laboratories
of Archaeology (RLA), http://rla.unc.edu/EMAS/index.html

Indeed, if one uses Miranda's own map scale as a guide, then Masse's house on the Río de Angelina stood 70 leagues (about 185 miles) west of New Orleans — which would put Masse somewhere around Hackberry, Louisiana, near Lake Charles. In other words, one could read Miranda's map either as placing Masse in Texas (if one goes by river names) or in Louisiana (if one goes by the map scale) . . . a contradiction that, when combined with the map's overall distortion, makes Miranda useless for determining Masse's place of residence.

A final piece of evidence: In the mid-1750s Masse petitioned the Spanish to permit him to move to Texas — a request the Spanish denied. However, if Masse had been living in Texas, as some have claimed, why would he have asked the Spanish to permit him to move to Texas? The answer is evident: He was not in Texas.

Ultimately, I think there is no reason to believe that André Masse resided anywhere during the period circa 1747 (when he first appeared in the historical record) to 1775 (by which time he had died) except in the Attakapas District. Indeed, there are several contemporary documents that overtly place Masse there, including church and civil records.

1756 document from the Poste des Attakapas church
containing several references to "Andre Masse," "Mr. [Monsieur]
Masse," and "Sr. [Sieur] Masse." Photo of a facsimile in the
African American Museum, St. Martinville, La.

Addendum: Weddle identified Masse in the historical record as early as 1728, citing as his source page 26 of Winston De Ville's book Opelousas: The History of a French and Spanish Military Post in America. But a glance at that page reveals that De Ville mentioned not Masse, but a certain "De Massy." Weddle, however, assumed that de Massy was the same as Masse, and he made this assumption without informing readers of the difference in surnames. Moreover, Weddle made this assumption even though De Ville himself noted that "[I]t cannot be determined who de Massy is" (though, De Ville mused, he might have been a Louisiana resident named Jean Massy, originally of Tours, France).

Oddly, Weddle did not cite De Ville's actual reference to André Masse elsewhere in Opelousas: On page 31 De Ville stated that the Frenchman "settled on the lower Trinity River in Texas. . . ." But on checking De Ville's source, one finds that it contains no reference to Masse!

So, again, I believe that there is no credible contemporary, primary-source evidence that Masse lived in Texas. Rather, the evidence shows that he lived in the Attakapas region of Louisiana, and that claims to the contrary are based on poor or non-existent data.

Sources:

Winston De Ville, Opelousas: The History of a French and Spanish Military Post in America, 1716-1803 (Cottonport, La.: Polyanthos, 1973).

José Antonio Pichardo, Pichardo’s Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas, Vols. 1-4 (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1931-1946).

Robert S. Weddle, The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682-1762 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991).

Debunking the Alleged Origin of the Word "Coonass"

2010-08-05T19:59:00.010-05:00

The thing I enjoy most about being a historian is the detective work — piecing together clues in search of historical facts. And sometimes that search results in the debunking of myths.

Take the alleged etymology (that is, word origin) of the term coonass, an ethnic label that some use as a synonym for Cajun. It's a controversial word because while many Cajuns embrace the term and regard it as a badge of ethnic pride, other Cajuns consider it highly offensive.

A novelty "Registered Coonass" sticker.

This etymology goes as follows: During World War II native Frenchmen inexplicably derided their Cajun GI liberators as conasses, a standard French word meaning "stupid person" or "dirty prostitute." Anglo-American GIs overheard this slur, misunderstood it as coonass, and used it in reference to Cajun GIs. After the war, the term came to be applied to Cajuns in general.

This alleged etymology is well-known and is still cited on occasion as authoritative. It appears to have been thought up in the early 1970s by the late cultural activist, politician, and attorney James "Jimmy" Domengeaux (1907-1988). As head of the Council for Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), Domengeaux railed against the term's use, including its use by then-Governor Edwin W. Edwards in jovial reference to himself.

Even if Domengeaux himself did not concoct this etymology, he certainly did more than anyone else to popularize it. In fact, the Louisiana state legislature condemned the use of coonass in 1981 not because the word referred to a raccoon's posterior, but because, as Domengeaux claimed, it supposedly hailed from the French slur conasse.

Excerpt from a 1981 resolution
condemning the word coonass.

I myself had always assumed that a blue-ribbon panel of university-trained linguists must have formulated the conasse explanation. I was therefore surprised to learn that it was merely one man's unconfirmed hypothesis. (Someone who had not taken Domengeaux’s etymology at face value was Cajun scholar Barry Jean Ancelet of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Ancelet rejected Domengeaux's notion as "shaky linguistics at best.")

It was quite by accident, however, that I ended up debunking Domengeaux's popular conasse etymology.

In the late 1990s I was searching the online database of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration for anything having to do with the Nike-Cajun rocket. The U.S. military invented the Nike-Cajun in the 1950s as a sounding rocket for testing the atmosphere. But why, I wondered, had it been called the Nike-Cajun rocket? The name evoked a strange combination of ancient Greek mythology and rural south Louisiana folklife.

A Nike-Cajun rocket.

I'll explain the origin of the Nike-Cajun in a later posting — but it was while researching this rocket that I stumbled across a reference to World War II stock footage depicting something called the Cajun Coonass.

What in the world was that? I wondered. As it turned out, the Cajun Coonass was the nickname of a U.S. warplane. In fact, the National Archives had a photograph of the airplane shot by the Army Signal Corps in April 1943.

The date’s significance took a few seconds to register. "That's over a year before D-Day.”

In other words, it was over a year before there were any Cajuns in France to be called conasse, the word that supposedly morphed into coonass: Domengeaux’s etymology was wrong.

Ordering a print of the photograph, I found that it did indeed show a U.S. airplane, specifically a C-47, sporting the word coonass on its fuselage — juxtaposed (some would say redundantly) with the word Cajun.

According to Army Signal Corps data from the back of the original print, the image was made not only over a year before the Allied invasion of France, but halfway around the world, in the South Pacific. (The plane's pilot, I should explain, was a Cajun from Sunset, Louisiana, and thus he had the privilege of naming the plane. It's therefore interesting that he chose the word coonass.)

1943 photograph of the C-47 Cajun Coonass (with enlarged inset).

Granted, Cajuns GIs could have been called conasse as early as 1942, when U.S. troops went up against Vichy French forces in North Africa; or even during World War I, when U.S. doughboys served in France. But Domengeaux had not made these claims, nor had the Louisiana state legislature made them in its concurrent resolution condemning coonass.

My own feeling is that coonass originated much closer to "home," that is, in the Acadiana region of south Louisiana or right across the border in east Texas, where Cajun culture mingled with the WASP-ish Bible-belt culture of the Lone Star State. This is mere speculation on my part, however, and for now the term's origin remains a mystery.

But thanks to this serendipitous discovery of the Cajun Coonass photograph in the National Archives, I now know the term did not arise as Domengeaux claimed in his conasse theory.

Some activists have expressed concern that debunking the conasse theory might set back the effort to stamp out coonass. My opinion is that the disproved conasse theory isn’t needed to stamp out the word: it should suffice to say, if one is so inclined, “I don’t want to be referred to as the backside of a raccoon!”

For more information on the word coonass and its colorful history, see my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2004), pp. 8, 15, 96-97, 109, 138, 142.

Agnus Dei Artifact Found on Banks of Bayou Teche

2010-07-30T23:34:00.011-05:00

As a professional historian and curator, I'm often asked to examine artifacts that people find in their closets, attics, backyards, and elsewhere.

Here I show one of these objets trouvés (that's a fancy French phrase for "found objects"). My neighbor uncovered it in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana — known in "the old days" as Pont Breaux — in the mud along Bayou Teche.

Agnus Dei object found on banks of Bayou Teche.

It's a metal object measuring 3/8 x 1 15/16 x 2.25 inches (5 x 49 x 56 mm) and apparently made of pewter or lead. While it looks old, I cannot be sure of its age. If I had to guess, I would say it's from the period circa 1750 to 1900. I assign a starting date of 1750 because it was around that time that the first Europeans came to the area.

And they came via the Teche, which early explorers used to travel deep into the semitropical south Louisiana frontier. For the next two hundred years residents of Attakapas (south-central Louisiana) used the Teche as a primary means of transportation, rowing and then steaming along its 130-mile path until railroads and highways all but killed off commercial river traffic. Today the Teche is used mainly by pleasure boaters, but occasionally tugboats still push barges laden with limestone or who-knows-what up the twisting waterway.

For comparison, another Agnus Dei with aureole.

Back to the object: It is obviously religious in nature and probably Roman Catholic in origin. I say this because the region's inhabitants were almost wholly of this faith, at least until recent decades. In fact, the object represents a common motif in Roman Catholic iconography: the Agnus Dei, Latin for "Lamb of God."

The lamb symbol was associated very early with Jesus. As written in John 1:20-34, "John saw Jesus coming to him and he saith: Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sins of the world."

This reference is preserved in the modern Roman Catholic liturgy when priests say:

"Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us."

Which in the old Latin liturgy would have been:

"Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis."

Another Agnus Dei example.

As seen in the photo at top, the artifact shows the lamb lying on a rectangular object and surrounded by a sunburst.

In Roman Catholic iconography the sunburst is called an aureole.

The rectangular object on the artifact symbolizes a book, specifically the Book of Seven Seals, which in Revelation was opened by a lamb. "And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals," it states, "and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see."

The Catholic Encyclopedia notes:

"Throughout the Apocalypse the portraiture of Jesus is that of the lamb. Through the shedding of its blood it has opened the book with seven seals and has triumphed over Satan."

Yet another Agnus Dei image.

The Catholic Encyclopedia identifies another Biblical figure associated with the symbol of the lamb:

"The Agnus Dei also appears in portraitures of St. John the Baptist, represented as lying upon a book held in his hand, or in an aureole. . . ."

Note the other examples of the Agnus Dei shown here. As you can see, they closely resemble the image on the artifact found in Breaux Bridge.

So this is what we have: A symbol of Jesus that is also associated with St. John the Baptist — namely, a classic rendition of the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, complete with aureole and the Book of the Seven Seals. (It does not have, however, the banner or flag often but not always shown in other depictions of the Agnus Dei.)

Religious symbolism aside, the purpose of the artifact in question remains a mystery: The back is flat and undecorated, suggesting the artifact was affixed to some other object, such as a Bible or piece of furniture. Whatever its origins, this objet trouvé seems to reflect the strong Roman Catholic tradition of south Louisiana, a tradition brought to the region by Acadian, French, and Spanish settlers, among others, who first moved up the Teche some two hundred fifty years ago.