Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, June 24, 1997

Cheniere au Tigre has romantic history

by Jim Bradshaw

These ridges, usually about 3 or 4 feet above sea level, are formed from old beaches left stranded in ancient times, when the marsh moved southward toward the Gulf. They are one of the rare relief features in a terrain measured in inches above sea level, extending along a regular, sandy Gulf shoreline stretching some 114 miles from the Sabine River on the west to Vermilion Bay on the east. The first people to come to these ridges were the Indians, and remnants of their burial mounds and middens (dumping grounds) can still be traced here and there on the ridges. Early explorers found one shaped like a pyramid, another, near Grand Lake, was in the form of an alligator.

The first reference to the cheniere region comes from a Spanish explorer, Don Jose de Evia, who traveled along the northern Gulf Coast in 1785. Evia provided a rough map and description of the area from Vermilion Bay westward. He had followed the coast for nearly 27 miles toward Bayou del Constante (which was so named because a Spanish ship, El Nuevo Constante, had shipwrecked there in 1766) in what is Cameron Parish today.

Indeed, Vermilion Parish's first explorers probably came to the chenieres for wood to repair storm-tossed ships. Old maps mark spots where the pirate Jean Lafitte and his men supposedly hid themselves, and perhaps, their treasure. Jim Bowie and his brother, Rezin, used the chenieres to store supplies and to hold slaves brought here for sale.

Acadians found the chenieres after 1755. Texans fled to them during the war for Texas independence, and Yankees began to show up after the Civil War, many of them to settle on land given them by the government. Outlaws and drifters found the isolated ridges to their liking.

One of the most romantic of these little islands, Cheniere au Tigre, Tiger Island, nestles on the Gulf shore in the southernmost region of Vermilion Parish, about 40 miles south of Abbeville. Cheniere au Tigre is located on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, running east to Southwest Pass and west to Freshwater Bayou.

The most popular version of the origin of Cheniere au Tigre's name concerns a party exploring the areas around the beginning of the 19th century. As the story goes, the party left a boy to watch a boat at a place called Hell Hole Bayou. When they returned, they found him clawed nearly to death and speculated that it had been done by a large wildcat.

However it got its name, Cheniere au Tigre is one of the bigger ridges, isolated from the mainland by marsh, stretching nearly 5 miles from east to west, 200 feet to a quarter of a mile wide.

Massive oaks tower above it, dangling wispy Spanish moss from gnarled branches. One oak, magnificent in girth, is probably more than 300 years old. Cactus and palmetto grow everywhere on the cheniere, including in the forks of the oak trees, 30 feet or more above the ground. Mesquite, hackberry, yucca, oleander, wild pepper and dune grass grow everywhere. Wild grape vines wind over, under, and around all.

Each spring and fall, tens of thousands of indigo and painted buntings, warblers, sparrows and swallows nest here, before and after a long migration across the Gulf to or from the Yucatan Peninsula. Ducks and geese and egrets and marsh birds of every description live here alongside nutria, muskrats, swamp rabbits, raccoons, 'possums, fox squirrels, deer, and, always and everywhere, alligators.

Cheniere au Tigre was a training base during the Texas Revolution In 1815. For about six months, soldiers loyal to the Lone Star State lived on the ridge and explored the area around it. Some of them would come back to settle, bringing friends with them.

The Dyson family was the first to settle the area, coming in the mid 1840s. Other early family names were White, Sagrera, Rodrique, and Choate. By the turn of the century there were between 25 and 30 families living at Cheniere au Tigre--cattlemen, hunters, trappers, and small farmers.

The cheniere's most famous institution appeared in 1913, when Mr. and Mrs. Raphael Semmes Sagrera opened the Sagrera Health Resort. The hotel consisted of two wings with a screened porch facing the Gulf. Each wing held eight rooms with two double beds each. Each room had a dressing table, chairs, a kerosene lamp, bowl and pitcher, as well as a covered chamber pot. There were five cottages not attached to the hotel, a dance hall, and a pier extending into the Gulf.

It did not take long for the hotel to lure people from across Acadiana. The Della D, Miss Abbeville, Harvey Lee, Wild West, and other boats picked up passengers in Lafayette, Milton, Abbeville and, later, Intracoastal City for a weekend at Cheniere au Tigre. At first, the fare was 50 cents a head, later a dollar for the round trip. Supplies were brought in on the schooner Martha White, operated by Dave While, Walter White, and the Sagrera brothers, and later on the Etta, owned by Isaac Sagrera.

People who could afford the hotel's $1.50 per day room and board carried suitcases. Poorer folk brought camping gear and wire coops filled with live chickens to be barbecued. Fresh seafood was the hotel specialty. Every morning a 600-foot, ox-drawn seine hauled in the day's requirement of shrimp, fish and crabs. And quite a requirement it was, as the dining room seated 125 people for three meals a day.

In addition to what the seine dragged in, oysters were culled by hand from reefs at Rollover Bayou, and crabs and fish were caught on lines. Fish commonly caught included croaker, flounder, red fish, drum, speckled trout, and alligator gar.

Many cattle were raised on the island, some for slaughter, most for sale. Cattle drives, sometimes with up to 6,000 head, were organized each year. Cattle were loaded on barges that were then pushed by the steamer Joe B. Chaffe up to unloading docks at Boston, Abbeville, or Intracoastal City. Sometimes the cattle herds could be driven across the marsh.

J. Oreo White, in a remembrance in the Vermilion Historical Society's History, recalls:

"In the spring, we would go on cattle drives from Cheniere au Tigre to Belle Isle and 'Punkin' Island. From there, we would go through the marshes to Pecan Island and then on to White Lake. Traveling slowly along the lake bank, we followed the Intracoastal Canal to Little Prairie. Sometimes the cattle drive went on to Forked Island. We would swim the Intracoastal Canal and go on to Esther to the Sagrera Brothers Ranch. Those drives took sometimes five to seven days. We slept where ever night took us: sometimes in trappers' camps, or on the ground. In the fall of the year, we would start on our way back, driving our cattle to Cheniere au Tigre for the winter range."

Hogs were grown for ham, sausage, and bacon, which were cured in a smokehouse at the Sagrera Hotel. Sheep from the cheniere provided wool and mutton.

On Saturday nights as many as 400 people jammed into the Sagrera dance hall to two-step and waltz to a Cajun fiddle. People sometimes rented sleeping space on the dance floor, and had to move their bedrolls and belongings to the rafters until the dancing was done.

Cheniere au Tigre seems to have benefitted from reports of the effects of its water and sand. Hopeful patients bathed in and drank the salty Gulf water. They also took mud baths and a treatment in which they were buried in the sand and then had salt water poured over them.

They testified that this water cure worked. One patient claimed that when she arrived at Cheniere au Tigre, she was on crutches and could hardly walk. After spending two or three summers there, she was able to walk without crutches. After her fourth summer she was cured. Her claim, "I felt stronger after just walking on the beach," and others like her, helped lure others for the cure (and sounded strangely like claims that would come some years later for another cure-all from Vermilion Parish).

In 1926, the Sagrera Hotel was modernized by the purchase of a Delco generator, and all cottages and rooms had a one-bulb electric light installed. That same year, water was piped to all cottages and a faucet was placed outside of all main entrances. A shower was put up on the front ridge next to the dance pavilion for the bathers coming in from the Gulf.

The St. Francis Chapel was built in 1927 and was administered from the St. John Church at Henry. A school house was built about that same time on the west end of the island.

Families started moving away from Cheniere au Tigre, in search of better times, during the Depression of the 1930s. World War II brought a brief respite, when the ridge became, a base for Coast Guard patrols. But the Guard left immediately after the war. The Sagrera health resort operated until 1957 when Hurricane Audrey administered a killing blow to it and to full-time occupancy of the island.

This article is copyrighted © by the Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser and is used with permission.  This web site was originated through a grant awarded to Carencro High School (Joel Hilbun/Bobbi Marino, Grant Administrators) by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from the Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund - 8(g).