Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, June 24, 1997

Attakapas were first to find parish

by Jim Bradshaw

Most investigators today say that they weren't the cannibals that the name implied. One of the reasons for that is that the Attakapas could make a pretty good living off all of the other things found here.

Three-fourths of Vermilion Parish is made up of salty sea-level marshes bordering Vermilion Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, rising northward to generally freshwater marshes interlaced with bayous and dotted with tree-covered islands called chenieres.

Rising northward from the freshwater marshes are sprawling prairies, stretching from east to west across the parish and northward approximately to its center. There the terrain changes to gradually undulating ridges. The tree lined Vermilion River winds southward to Vermilion Bay.

Wakeman E. Edwards, in his "Vignettes of Vermilion Parish History," gives a vivid description of the place in the early 1800s, before Vermilion Parish became widely settled.

"A vast expanse of prairie of great fertility, interspersed with groves of timber, traversed by bayous and smaller water courses furnish abundant water for man and beast; where once abounded the deer and buffalo, the wild turkey and the prairie chicken or grouse, beautiful lakes, bays, and ponds abounding in fish, and with geese, brant, and ducks in their season over all of the wide prairie; bays and sea coast abounding with fish--sheepshead, mullet, flounder, red fish, sea trout, sea cat, Spanish mackerel, tarpon, shrimp, oysters without end; all the estuaries and salt water coolies (sic) swarmed with crabs; the ... alligator was present almost everywhere; sea turtle and terrapin all to be had for the taking, with prairies covered with cattle and horses ....

"The Eastern portion of the parish ... was thickly interspersed with round ponds. These ponds were almost a perfect circle and from fifty to one hundred and fifty feet in diameter and from one foot to two feet deep when full .... They (once) nearly all contained water the whole season through and the cattle of the prairies used to stand in these ponds in the heat of the summer days, and they were a great resort for ducks at night during the fall and winter. The early settlers of the country used to sow rice in these ponds and raise fine crops with very little trouble ....

"What was their origin has been a matter of much speculation. They were not natural productions, nor the work of the Indians. It has been supposed that they were produced by buffaloes herding up in a bunch to avoid flies and mosquitoes and made a 'stamp' which then filled up with water and then when the buffaloes stamped in it again they carried out mud on their feet and thus dug the pond ....

"The banks of the bayou Vermilion were well wooded with red oak, white oak, sweet gum, black gum, elm, linden or basswood, cypress, willow, hickory, magnolia, holly, ash, maple, iron wood, water oak, Spanish oak, hackberry, prickly ash, pecan, pignut, live oak, and other woods. Other streams were well wooded also and a large tract of wooded land east of Abbeville containing several thousand acres called Grosse Isle suddenly rises up out of the surrounding prairies to a considerable elevation. Besides the game already mentioned at our epoch, there were upland plover ..., snipes of different varieties in great abundance in their season, sand bill cranes, grosbec, and finally that prince of game birds, 'Bob White."'

It was to this fertile area that the Attakapas came, whenever they came, spreading from Vermilion Bay to the west. The French called all of the Indians between Vermilion and Galveston bays Attakapas, but those on Texas Trinity River and Trinity Bay were known to the Spaniards as Horoquisa, Oroguisac or Akokisa. In Louisiana, the region including what is now St. Mary, Iberia, Vermilion, St. Martin, and Lafayette parishes was once known as the Attakapas District because they lived here.

Legend has it that the Attakapas came to Acadiana from the West, possibly from Mexico. One tale has it that their god put them down in mountains near San Antonio shortly after a great flood.

There is an old letter written by a man named Duralde that reports:

"Attakapas pretend that they ... come out of the sea, that a prophet or man inspired by God laid down the rules of conduct to their first ancestors, which consisted of not doing any evil. They believed that those who do evil descend under the earth into the shades. They speak of a deluge which swallowed up men, animals, and the land, and it was only those who resided along a high land or mountain ... who escaped calamity." By the 1700s, there were three main bands of Attakapas in Louisiana. The easternmost band was located on the Vermilion River and Vermilion Bay. Their main village was probably above present-day Abbeville on the river. In 1760, Chief Skenne-mok (Short Arrow) sold a strip two leagues wide between Bayou Teche and the Vermilion River, along with the land on which his village was situated, to the Frenchman Fuselier de la Clair, and from then on tribal lands steadily diminished.

(A league is most often taken to equal about three miles.)

The Vermilion village was not finally abandoned until the early 1880s. In 1779, during the American Revolution, it supplied 60 men to Louisiana's Spanish Governor Bernardo de Galvez for an expedition against the British forts on the Mississippi River.

Another Attakapas band lived farther to the west, on the lower Mermentau River, from Nezpique Prairie to Grand Lake, along Bayou Plaquemine Brule. In 1779, this group loaned Galvez 120 men. In 1787, the main village of this group was called the "Island of Lacassine," in honor of its chief. The village was abandoned in 1799 - in favor of one on the Mermentau River. Historians think the new site was the last village of the eastern Attakapas. The Indians lived there until 1836, when the band scattered. Some of these joined the western Attakapas near Lake Charles, but others scattered as far afield as Oklahoma.

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