Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, August 26, 1997

Acadia was once part of Imperial St. Landry

Early parish landowners settled along the riverbanks

by Jim Bradshaw

French and Canadian traders, known as coureurs de bois, visited the posts to trade for furs, tallow, bear grease, indigo, horses, and other goods. Settlements grew up around the trading posts and, when the Spanish took over Louisiana, they became government centers.

Today's Acadia Parish was part of a huge territory governed from the Poste des Opelousas, which was later to be called St. Landry Parish. In later years, it became known as "Imperial St. Landry,"' because it was the size of a small kingdom. The original district included what is now St. Landry, Evangeline, Jefferson Davis, Beauregard, Allen, Calcasieu, and Cameron parishes. But it took awhile to get the place settled. In 1777, there was a total population of only 756 in all of this huge district. This included 100 white men, 139 white women, 211 boys, 123 girls, 120 male Negroes, and 98 female Negroes. The black population included 11 gens de couleur libres (free persons of color).

Early Acadia Parish holdings were divided into long, narrow strips, fronting on a river or bayou. Each grant began at the bank of the stream and extended back from it, usually for a depth of 40 arpents, an arpent being about 192 feet. Later, as the prairies of the parish were developed, largely after the Louisiana Purchase, the French "riverbank" system was abandoned, and the American "checkerboard" pattern of land division took its place. This system was based on townships, sections, and quarter sections. Most of Acadia's open prairies were unclaimed and unsettled until well after 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase.

The riverbank system came about because waterways were the principal arteries of commerce in those days, and also because the good, well-drained land was usually to be found on the natural ridges that bordered these waterways. The earliest land grants in what would become Acadia Parish were along Bayou Plaquemine Brûlée, Bayou Wikoff, Bayou Mallet, and, to a lesser degree, on the Mermentau River, Bayou des Cannes, Bayou Nezpique, and Bayou Queue de Tortue. There were a few others on smaller streams.

Not all of the Acadia Parish landowners lived on their lands. A good number of them lived at Opelousas or St. Martinville and maintained vacheries, cattle ranches, on their Acadia Parish holdings. Some others were simply land speculators who made early claims and later profits.

Old records at Opelousas show that at least nine land owners were in the Acadia Parish area at least 200 years ago. The 1770 militia list includes Antoine Langlois, Donato Bello, Antoine Boisdoré, Joseph Cormier, Andre Mondon, Pierre Mallet, Louis Richard, Victor Richard, and Sylvain Sonnier. The militia fist of 1776 adds Blaise Lejeune, Michel Prudhomme, Fabien Richard, Pierre Trahan, Charles Bourassas, Jean-Baptiste Stelly, Paul Boutin, and Pierre Guidry. Three other names appear on the list in 1777: Joseph Poiret, Michel Carrier, Pierre Richard.

Although the parish is named for the Cajun homeland, only about 20 percent of the parish's early landowners were Acadians. Early Cajun family names include Arceneaux, Bourque, Breaux, Bernard, Chiasson, Cormier, Granger, Guilbeau, Guidry, Lambert, LeBrun, Leger, Lejeune, Martin, Mouton, Richard, Sonnier, and Trahan. Other nationalities represented among the early landowners were French, German, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Swiss, and English. Five landowners were gens de couleur libres.

Most of Acadia's early settlers were cattlemen, many of whom seldom knew how many cattle they owned. Many estate inventories list "'an unknown quantity of horned cattle." Cattle were branded and allowed to roam at large on the prairies until it was time to round them up and herd them to market.

These frontier farmers, even the wealthier ones, owned few luxury items. Musical instruments, clocks, jewelry, and mirrors appear in few of the inventories taken of the early estates. Bottles and demijohns were prized possessions.

Most households had at least one spinning wheel. Other common household items were feather mattresses, pillows, paillasse (a mattress tick stuffed with dried corn shucks), armoires, chairs, tables, bedsteads, crockery, pots and pans, bed linens, churns, salting tubs, candle molds, soap pots, and irons. Virtually all estate inventories listed shotguns or fusils (a type of musket), or some other firearm.

Conspicuous by their absence from the estate inventories of Acadia's early settlers are boats of any kind. Few list even a pirogue, skiff, or other kind of small boat, even though most of the early grants were fronted on waterways. Oxcarts were common items. A few inventories list a calèche, a two-wheeled vehicle drawn by one horse. There were a few four-wheeled carriages.

There were some advantages to prairie settling, probably chief among them that the land needed no clearing. As early historian C. C. Robin. put it in "Voyage to Louisiana" : "The prairie land ... awaits only the plow and the spade. The landowner may easily house himself. It takes only a few days to build a cabin. It takes only a few mornings' work to place this prodigious land into production sufficiently to support a family."

Wild game was abundant on the prairies. Robin reported the prairies well-stocked with game, "and especially during the winter they are covered with ducks and geese, so the inhabitant has his choice of birds as if they were in his own poultry yard." More than three quarters of a century after Robin's visit, the editor of The Opelousas Courier (Nov. 6, 1886) offered editorial comment on the game: "Wild geese, sandhill cranes, and robins are flying over ... jacksnipe are worth 75 cents a dozen, large ducks 12½ to 15 cents each ... ducks are so abundant in the market that mallards sold at 10 cents and teal at 4 cents. This is cheaper and better than buying pork." Quail and papabottes (Louisiana upland plover) were also plentiful. The Courier reported on Aug. 20, 1887, that "Papabottes are very fat now. The birds are wild, however, and not so abundant as in former years. This is owing to the prairies being nearly all wired for pasture and the grass being too high for the birds to feed on. The papabotte wants short grass to ramble in."

The soft feathers plucked from the wild game and domestic fowl made warm mattresses and soft pillows for the settler and his family. Another native product was put to good use: Spanish moss, used from earliest colonial times for pillows and mattresses and woven into braids for bridles, saddles, blankets, and horse collars. The moss was picked from trees, stacked in piles and soaked in water until the gray outer coating rotted away, exposing the fine black fiber in the center. It was then hung out on fences or clothes lines to dry.

The prairie dweller needed shade. For this he planted several varieties of common trees: oak, catalpa, and chinaberry. The chinaberry was the most popular shade tree because of its rapid growth. Introduced from Asia by way of Haiti, the chinaberry formed an umbrella of shade for both people and animals during the summer months. In spring, the chinaberry put out clusters of lilac-colored flowers, and was called lilas parasol, lilac parasol, by the Acadians. After the blooms fall, the seeds form perfectly round, green berries, somewhat smaller than marbles. These made fine ammunition for small boys to use in their popguns made of elderberry or the reeds of roseau grass. The chinaberry seeds were also used for beads and bracelets. The fleshy part of the seed could be boiled off or allowed to rot away, exposing the attractively shaped hard centers, which could then be dyed and strung into necklaces and bracelets.

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