water, into which fall the shadows of great trees. A tug is dragging
along a tow of old rafts composed of cypress logs all water-soaked,
green with weeds and grass, so that it looks like a floating garden.
What pictures! Clusters of oaks on the prairie; a picturesque old
cotton-press; a house thatched with palmettoes; rice-fields irrigated by
pumps; darkies, field-hands, men and women, hoeing in the cane-fields,
giving stalwart strokes that exhibit their robust figures; an old
sugar-mill in ruin and vine-draped; an old begass chimney against the
sky; an antique cotton-press with its mouldering roof supported on
timbers; a darky on a mule motionless on the bank, clad in Attakapas
cloth, his slouch hat falling about his head like a roof from which the
rafters have been withdrawn; palmettoes, oaks, and funereal moss; lines
of Spanish-bayonets; rickety wharves; primitive boats; spider-legged
bridges. Neither on the Teche nor the Atchafalaya, nor on the great
plain near the Mississippi, fit for amphibious creatures, where one
standing on the level wonders to sec the wheels of the vast river
steamers above him, apparently without cause, revolving, is there any
lack of the picturesque.
New Iberia, the thriving mart of the region, which has drawn away the
life from St. Martinsville, ten miles farther up the bayou, is a
village mainly of small frame houses, with a smart court-house, a lively
business street, a few pretty houses, and some oldtime mansions on the
bank of the bayou, half smothered in old rose gardens, the ground in the
rear sloping to the water under the shade of gigantic oaks. One of
them, which with its outside staircases in the pillared gallery suggests
Spanish taste on the outside, and in the interior the arrangement of
connecting rooms a French chateau, has a self-keeping rose garden, where
one might easily become sentimental; the vines disport themselves
like holiday children, climbing the trees, the side of the house, and
revelling in an abandon of color and perfume.
The population is mixed—Americans, French, Italians, now and then a
Spaniard and even a Mexican, occasionally a basket-making Attakapas,
and the all-pervading person of color. The darky is a born fisherman, in
places where fishing requires no exertion, and one may see him any
hour seated on the banks of the Teche, especially the boy and the
sun-bonneted woman, placidly holding their poles over the muddy stream,
and can study, if he like, the black face in expectation of a bite.
There too are the washer-women, with their tubs and a plank thrust
into the water, and a handkerchief of bright colors for a turban. These
people somehow never fail to be picturesque, whatever attitude they
take, and they are not at all self-conscious. The groups on Sunday give
an interest to church-going—a lean white horse, with a man, his wife,
and boy strung along its backbone, an aged darky and his wife seated in
a cart, in stiff Sunday clothes and flaming colors, the wheels of the
cart making all angles with the ground, and wabbling and creaking
along, the whole party as proud of its appearance as Julius Caesar in a
triumph.
I drove on Sunday morning early from New Iberia to church at St.
Martinsville. It was a lovely April morning. The way lay over fertile
prairies, past fine cane plantations, with some irrigation, and for a
distance along the pretty Teche, shaded by great live-oaks, and here and
there a fine magnolia-tree; a country with few houses, and those mostly
shanties, but a sunny, smiling land, loved of the birds. We passed on
our left the Spanish Lake, a shallow, irregular body of water. My
driver was an ex-Confederate soldier, whose tramp with a musket through
Virginia had not greatly enlightened him as to what it was all about.
As to the Acadians, however, he had a decided opinion, and it was a poor
one. They are no good. “You ask them a question, and they shrug their
shoulders like a tarrapin—don’t know no more’n a dead alligator; only
language they ever have is ‘no’ and ‘what?’.rdquo;
If St. Martinsville, once the scat of fashion, retains anything of its
past elegance, its life has departed from it. It has stopped growing
anything but old, and yet it has not much of interest that is antique;
it is a village of small white frame houses, with three or four big
gaunt brick structures, two stories and a half high, with galleries,
and here and there a Creole cottage, the stairs running up inside the
galleries, over which roses climb in profusion.
I went to breakfast at a French inn, kept by Madame Castillo, a large
red-brick house on the banks of the Teche, where the live-oaks cast
shadows upon the silvery stream. It had, of course, a double gallery.
Below, the waiting-room, dining-room, and general assembly-room were
paved with brick, and instead of a door, Turkey-red curtains hung in the
entrance, and blowing aside, hospitably invited the stranger within. The
breakfast was neatly served, the house was scrupulously clean, and the
guest felt the influence of that personal hospitality which is always so
pleasing. Madame offered me a seat in her pew in church, and meantime
a chair on the upper gallery, which opened from large square sleeping
chambers. In that fresh morning I thought I never had seen a more
sweet and peaceful place than this gallery. Close to it grew graceful
China-trees in full blossom and odor; up and down the Teche were
charming views under the oaks; only the roofs of the town could be seen
amid the foliage of China-trees; and there was an atmosphere of repose
in all the scene.
It was Easter morning. I felt that I should like to linger there a week
in absolute forgetfulness of the world. French is the ordinary language
of the village, spoken more or less corruptly by all colors.
The Catholic church, a large and ugly structure, stands on the plaza,
which is not at all like a Spanish plaza, but a veritable New England
“green,” with stores and shops on all sides—New England, except that
the shops are open on Sunday. In the church apse is a noted and not bad
painting of St. Martin, and at the bottom of one aisle a vast bank of
black stucco clouds, with the Virgin standing on them, and the legend,
“Je suis l’immaculee conception.”
Country people were pouring into town for the Easter service and
festivities—more blacks than whites—on horseback and in rickety
carriages, and the horses were hitched on either side of the church.
Before service the square was full of lively young colored lads cracking
Easter-eggs. Two meet and strike together the eggs in their hands, and
the one loses whose egg breaks. A tough shell is a valuable possession.
The custom provokes a good deal of larking and merriment. While this is
going on, the worshippers are making their way into the church
through the throng, ladies in the neat glory of provincial dress, and
high-stepping, saucy colored belles, yellow and black, the blackest in
the most radiant apparel of violent pink and light blue, and now and
then a society favorite in all the hues of the rainbow. The centre pews
of the church are reserved for the whites, the seats of the side aisles
for the negroes. When mass begins, the church is crowded. The boys,
with occasional excursions into the vestibule to dip the finger in the
holy-water, or perhaps say a prayer, are still winning and losing eggs
on the preen.
On the gallery at the inn it is also Sunday. The air is full of odor. A
strong south wind begins to blow. I think the south wind is the wind
of memory and of longing. I wonder if the gay spirits of the last
generation ever return to the scenes of their revelry? Will they come
back to the theatre this Sunday night, and to the Grand Ball afterwards?
The admission to both is only twenty-five cents, including gombo file.
From New Iberia southward towards Vermilion Bay stretches a vast
prairie; if it is not absolutely fiat, if it resembles the ocean, it
is the ocean when its long swells have settled nearly to a calm. This
prairie would be monotonous were it not dotted with small round ponds,
like hand-mirrors for the flitting birds and sailing clouds, were its
expanse not spotted with herds of cattle, scattered or clustering like
fishing-boats on a green sea, were it not for a cabin here and there, a
field of cane or cotton, a garden plot, and were it not for the forests
which break the horizon line, and send out dark capes into the verdant
plains. On a gray day, or when storms and fogs roll in from the Gulf, it
might be a gloomy region, but under the sunlight and in the spring it is
full of life and color; it has an air of refinement and repose that is
very welcome. Besides the uplift of the spirit that a wide horizon is
apt to give, one is conscious here of the neighborhood of the sea, and
of the possibilities of romantic adventure in a coast intersected by
bayous, and the presence of novel forms of animal and vegetable life,
and of a people with habits foreign and strange. There is also a
grateful sense of freedom and expansion.
Soon, over the plain, is seen on the horizon, ten miles from New Iberia,
the dark foliage on the island of Petite Anse, or Wery’s Island. This
unexpected upheaval from the marsh, bounded by the narrow, circling
Petite Anse Bayou, rises into the sky one hundred and eighty feet,
and has the effect in this flat expanse of a veritable mountain,
comparatively a surprise, like Pike’s Peak seen from the elevation of
Denver. Perhaps nowhere else would a hill of one hundred and eighty
feet make such an impression on the mind. Crossing the bayou, where
alligators sun themselves and eye with affection the colored people
angling at the bridge, and passing a long causeway over the marsh, the
firm land of the island is reached. This island, which is a sort of
geological puzzle, has a very uneven surface, and is some two and a half
miles long by one mile broad. It is a little kingdom in itself, capable
of producing in its soil and adjacent waters nearly everything one
desires of the necessaries of life. A portion of the island is devoted
to a cane plantation and sugar-works; a part of it is covered with
forests; and on the lowlands and gentle slopes, besides thickets of
palmetto, are gigantic live-oaks, moss-draped trees monstrous in girth,
and towering into the sky with a vast spread of branches. Scarcely
anywhere else will one see a nobler growth of these stately trees. In
a depression is the famous saltmine, unique in quality and situation
in the world. Here is grown and put up the Tobasco pepper; here, amid
fields of clover and flowers, a large apiary flourishes. Stones of some
value for ornament are found.
Indeed, I should not be surprised at anything turning up there, for I am
told that good kaoline has been discovered; and about the residences
of the hospitable proprietors roses bloom in abundance, the China-tree
blossoms sweetly, and the mocking-bird sings.
But better than all these things I think I like the view from the broad
cottage piazzas, and I like it best when the salt breeze is strong
enough to sweep away the coast mosquitoes—a most undesirable variety. I
do not know another view of its kind for extent and color comparable to
that from this hill over the waters seaward. The expanse of luxuriant
grass, brown, golden, reddish, in patches, is intersected by a network
of bayous, which gleam like silver in the sun, or trail like dark
fabulous serpents under a cloudy sky. The scene is limited only by the
power of the eye to meet the sky line. Vast and level, it is constantly
changing, almost in motion with life; the long grass and weeds run like
waves when the wind blows, great shadows of clouds pass on its surface,
alternating dark masses with vivid ones of sunlight; fishing-boats and
the masts of schooners creep along the threads of water; when the sun
goes down, a red globe of fire in the Gulf mists, all the expanse is
warm and ruddy, and the waters sparkle like jewels; and at night, under
the great field of stars, marsh fires here and there give a sort of
lurid splendor to the scene. In the winter it is a temperate spot, and
at all times of the year it is blessed by an invigorating seabreeze.
Those who have enjoyed the charming social life and the unbounded
hospitality of the family who inhabit this island may envy them their
paradisiacal home, but they would be able to select none others so
worthy to enjoy it.
It is said that the Attakapas Indians are shy of this island, having
a legend that it was the scene of a great catastrophe to their race.
Whether this catastrophe has any connection with the upheaval of the
salt mountain I do not know. Many stories are current in this region in
regard to the discovery of this deposit. A little over a quarter of a
century ago it was unsuspected. The presence of salt in the water of
a small spring led somebody to dig in that place, and at the depth of
sixteen feet below the surface solid salt was struck. In stripping away
the soil several relics of human workmanship came to light, among them
stone implements and a woven basket, exactly such as the Attakapas make
now. This basket, found at the depth of sixteen feet, lay upon the salt
rock, and was in perfect preservation. Half of it can now be seen in the
Smithsonian Institution. At the beginning of the war great quantities of
salt were taken from this mine for the use of the Confederacy. But this
supply was cut off by the Unionists, who at first sent gunboats up the
bayou within shelling distance, and at length occupied it with troops.
The ascertained area of the mine is several acres; the depth of the
deposit is unknown. The first shaft was sunk a hundred feet; below
this a shaft of seventy feet fails to find any limit to the salt.
The excavation is already large. Descending, the visitor enters vast
cathedral-like chambers; the sides are solid salt, sparkling with
crystals; the floor is solid salt; the roof is solid salt, supported
on pillars of salt left by the excavators, forty or perhaps sixty feet
square. When the interior is lighted by dynamite the effect is superbly
weird and grotesque. The salt is blasted by dynamite, loaded into ears
which run on rails to the elevator, hoisted, and distributed into the
crushers, and from the crushers directly into the bags for shipment.
The crushers differ in crushing capacity, some producing fine and others
coarse salt. No bleaching or cleansing process is needed; the salt
is almost absolutely pure. Large blocks of it are sent to the Western
plains for “cattle licks.” The mine is connected by rail with the main
line at New Iberia.
Across the marshes and bayous eight miles to the west from Petite Anse
Island rises Orange Island, famous for its orange plantation, but
called Jefferson Island since it became the property and home of Joseph
Jefferson. Not so high as Petite Anse, it is still conspicuous with its
crown of dark forest. From a high point on Petite Anse, through a lovely
vista of trees, with flowering cacti in the foreground, Jefferson’s
house is a white spot in the landscape. We reached it by a circuitous
drive of twelve miles over the prairie, sometimes in and sometimes out
of the water, and continually diverted from our course by fences. It is
a good sign of the thrift of the race, and of its independence, that the
colored people have taken up or bought little tracts of thirty or forty
acres, put up cabins, and new fences round their domains regardless of
the travelling public. We zigzagged all about the country to get round
these little enclosures. At one place, where the main road was bad, a
thrifty Acadian had set up a toll of twenty-five cents for the privilege
of passing through his premises. The scenery was pastoral and pleasing.
There were frequent round ponds, brilliant with lilies and
fleurs-de-lis, and hundreds of cattle feeding on the prairie or standing
In the water, and generally of a dun-color, made always an agreeable
picture. The monotony was broken by lines of trees, by cape-like woods
stretching into the plain, and the horizon line was always fine. Great
variety of birds enlivened the landscape, game birds abounding. There
was the lively little nonpareil, which seems to change its color, and is
red and green and blue, I believe of the oriole family, the papabotte,
a favorite on New Orleans tables in the autumn, snipe, killdee, the
cherooke (snipe?), the meadow-lark, and quantities of teal ducks in the
ponds. These little ponds are called “bull-holes.” The traveller is told
that they are started in this watery soil by the pawing of bulls, and
gradually enlarged as the cattle frequent them. He remembers that he has
seen similar circular ponds in the North not made by bulls.
Mr. Jefferson’s residence—a pretty rose-vine-covered cottage—is situated
on the slope of the hill, overlooking a broad plain and a vast stretch
of bayou country. Along one side of his home enclosure for a mile runs
a superb hedge of Chickasaw roses. On the slope back of the house, and
almost embracing it, is a magnificent grove of live-oaks, great gray
stems, and the branches hung with heavy masses of moss, which swing in
the wind like the pendent boughs of the willow, and with something of
its sentimental and mournful suggestion. The recesses of this forest
are cool and dark, but upon ascending the hill, suddenly bursts upon the
view under the trees a most lovely lake of clear blue water. This lake,
which may be a mile long and half a mile broad, is called Lake Peigneur,
from its fanciful resemblance, I believe, to a wool-comber. The shores
are wooded. On the island side the bank is precipitous; on the opposite
shore amid the trees is a hunting-lodge, and I believe there are
plantations on the north end, but it is in aspect altogether solitary
and peaceful. But the island did not want life. The day was brilliant,
with a deep blue sky and high-sailing fleecy clouds, and it seemed a
sort of animal holiday: squirrels chattered; cardinal-birds flashed
through the green leaves; there flitted about the red-winged blackbird,
blue jays, redheaded woodpeckers, thrushes, and occasionally a rain-crow
crossed the scene; high overhead sailed the heavy buzzards, describing
great aerial circles; and off in the still lake the ugly heads of
alligators were toasting in the sun.
It was very pleasant to sit on the wooded point, enlivened by all this
animal activity, looking off upon the lake and the great expanse of
marsh, over which came a refreshing breeze. There was great variety of
forest-trees. Besides the live-oaks, in one small area I noticed the
water-oak, red-oak, pin-oak, the elm, the cypress, the hackberry, and
the pecan tree.
This point is a favorite rendezvous for the buzzards. Before I reached
it I heard a tremendous whirring in the air, and, lo! there upon the
oaks were hundreds and hundreds of buzzards. Upon one dead tree, vast,
gaunt, and bleached, they had settled in black masses. When I came near
they rose and flew about with clamor and surprise, momentarily
obscuring the sunlight. With these unpleasant birds consorted in unclean
fellowship numerous long-necked water-turkeys.
Doré would have liked to introduce into one of his melodramatic pictures
this helpless dead tree, extending its gray arms loaded with these black
scavengers. It needed the blue sky and blue lake to prevent the scene
from being altogether uncanny. I remember still the harsh, croaking
noise of the buzzards and the water-turkeys when they were disturbed,
and the flapping of their funereal wings, and perhaps the alligators
lying off in the lake noted it, for they grunted and bellowed a
response. But the birds sang merrily, the wind blew softly; there was
the repose as of a far country undisturbed by man, and a silvery tone on
the water and all the landscape that refined the whole.
If the Acadians can anywhere be seen in the prosperity of their
primitive simplicity, I fancy it is in the parish of Vermilion, in the
vicinity of Abbeville and on the Bayou Tigre. Here, among the intricate
bayous that are their highways and supply them with the poorer sort of
fish, and the fair meadows on which their cattle pasture, and where they
grow nearly everything their simple habits require, they have for over
a century enjoyed a quiet existence, practically undisturbed by the
agitations of modern life, ignorant of its progress. History makes their
departure from the comparatively bleak meadows of Grand Pré a cruel
hardship, if a political necessity. But they made a very fortunate
exchange. Nowhere else on the continent could they so well have
preserved their primitive habits, or found climate and soil so suited
to their humor. Others have exhaustively set forth the history and
idiosyncrasies of this peculiar people; it is in my way only to tell
what I saw on a spring day.
To reach the heart of this abode of contented and perhaps wise ignorance
we took boats early one morning at Petite Anse Island, while the dew was
still heavy and the birds were at matins, and rowed down the Petite
Anse Bayou. A stranger would surely be lost in these winding, branching,
interlacing streams. Evangeline and her lover might have passed each
other unknown within hail across these marshes. The party of a dozen
people occupied two row-boats. Among them were gentlemen who knew the
route, but the reserve of wisdom as to what bayous and cutoffs were
navigable was an ancient ex-slave, now a voter, who responded to
the name of “Honorable”—a weather-beaten and weather-wise darky, a
redoubtable fisherman, whose memory extended away beyond the war, and
played familiarly about the person of Lafayette, with whom he had been
on agreeable terms in Charleston, and who dated his narratives, to our
relief, not from the war, but from the year of some great sickness on
the coast. From the Petite Anse we entered the Carlin Bayou, and wound
through it is needless to say what others in our tortuous course. In
the fresh morning, with the salt air, it was a voyage of delight. Mullet
were jumping in the glassy stream, perhaps disturbed by the gar-fish,
and alligators lazily slid from the reedy banks into the water at our
approach. All the marsh was gay with flowers, vast patches of the blue
fleur-de-lis intermingled with the exquisite white spider-lily, nodding
in clusters on long stalks; an amaryllis (pancratium), its pure halfdisk
fringed with delicate white filaments. The air was vocal with the notes
of birds, the nonpareil and the meadow-lark, and most conspicuous of
all the handsome boat-tail grackle, a blackbird, which alighted on the
slender dead reeds that swayed with his weight as he poured forth his
song. Sometimes the bayou narrowed so that it was impossible to row
with the oars, and poling was resorted to, and the current was swift and
strong. At such passes we saw only the banks with nodding flowers,
and the reeds, with the blackbirds singing, against the sky. Again we
emerged into placid reaches overhung by gigantic live-oaks and fringed
with cypress. It was enchanting. But the way was not quite solitary.
Numerous fishing parties were encountered, boats on their way to the
bay, and now and then a party of stalwart men drawing a net in the
bayou, their clothes being deposited on the banks. Occasionally a large
schooner was seen, tied to the bank or slowly working its way, and on
one a whole family was domesticated. There is a good deal of queer life
hidden in these bayous.
After passing through a narrow artificial canal, we came into the Bayou
Tigre, and landed for breakfast on a greensward, with meadow-land and
signs of habitations in the distance, under spreading live-oaks. Under
one of the most attractive of these trees, close to the stream, we did
not spread our table-cloth and shawls, because a large moccason snake
was seen to glide under the roots, and we did not know but that his
modesty was assumed, and he might join the breakfast party. It is
said that these snakes never attack any one who has kept all the ten
commandments from his youth up. Cardinal-birds made the wood gay for us
while we breakfasted, and we might have added plenty of partridges to
our menu if we had been armed.