Teche: A History of Louisiana's Most Famous Bayou

Teche

BOOKS BY SHANE K. BERNARD

The Cajuns: Americanization of a People

Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors: A Young Reader’s History

(available in English and French editions)

Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues

Tabasco: An Illustrated History

Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis, series editors

Teche

A History of Louisiana’s Most Famous Bayou

Shane K. Bernard

This contribution has been supported with funding provided by the Louisiana Sea Grant College Program (LSG) under NOAA Award # NA14OAR4170099. Additional support is from the Louisiana Sea Grant Foundation. The funding support of LSG and NOAA is gratefully acknowledged, along with the matching support by LSU. Logo created by Louisiana Sea Grant College Program.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2016 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2016

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bernard, Shane K., author.

Title: Teche : a history of Louisiana’s most famous bayou / Shane K. Bernard. Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2016. | Series: America’s Third Coast series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016005806 (print) | LCCN 2016024272 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496809414 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496809421 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Teche, Bayou (La.)—History. | Teche, Bayou (La.)—Environmental conditions. | Bernard, Shane K.—Travel—Louisiana—Teche, Bayou. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV). | TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues.

Classification: LCC F377.T4 B47 2016 (print) | LCC F377.T4 (ebook) | DDC 976.3/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016005806

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To Amy Lançon Bernard,

born and reared along the Teche;

in memory of Glenn R. Conrad,

historian of the Teche Country

There exists no known river on the globe with traits of exact analogy to the Teche; many of its features are peculiar to itself. . . . [A]nd for that simple reason, it is almost impossible to describe the Teche, in language conveying clear conceptions of the object; as there is no river with which it can be correctly compared.

—William Darby, The Emigrant’s Guide to the Western and Southwestern States and Territories (1818)

Contents

Introduction

Part One

1: Settling the Teche

2: Exploring the Bayou

3: From a Colonial to an American Teche

4: The Teche during Wartime

5: Hard Times on the Bayou

6: Designing the Bayou

Conclusion

Part Two

Teche Canoe Trip Journal (2011–13)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Bayou Teche flows for 125 miles through the south Louisiana regions known formerly as the Poste des Opelousas and the Poste des Attakapas.

The entire length of Bayou Teche from Port Barre in the north to Patterson in the south.

The upper Teche from Port Barre downstream to Parks.

The Teche from Parks downstream to Franklin.

The lower Teche from Charenton downstream to Patterson; below the Teche runs the Lower Atchafalaya River.

Teche

Introduction

A south Louisiana native, I have lived most of my life only a short distance from Bayou Teche. For nearly the past two decades, in fact, I have resided only about three blocks from the bayou. After reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi a few years ago, it occurred to me to write a history of the Teche, because it seemed that I had practically in my own backyard a Mississippi River in miniature (as I describe the bayou elsewhere in this book). Decidedly in miniature: for while the Mississippi at New Orleans discharges about 600,000 cubic feet of water per second, the Teche near Jeanerette discharges only about 415 cubic feet per second. While the Mississippi River runs about 2,300 miles in length, the Teche runs only about 125 miles. And while the Mississippi spans 2,500 feet from bank to bank at the Crescent City, the Teche stretches only about 550 feet at its widest point (just above Patterson). For most of its course, however, the Teche runs much narrower: about 90 feet at Arnaudville, about 145 feet at New Iberia and St. Martinville, and about 225 feet at Franklin.¹

Despite its relative smallness, the Teche is a historically significant Louisiana waterway—much more significant than its size would at first suggest. William Darby noted this quality in 1817, when in his Geographical Description of the State of Louisiana he observed, This river . . . claims more notice from the political economist and geographer, than either its length or quantity of water would seem to justify. The reasons for this seemingly extravagant attention, according to Darby, were the bayou’s fortunate location and agreeable climate, combined with the amazing fertility and yet (at the time) relative cheapness of farmland along its banks. These qualities, he asserted, gave the Teche Country a decided preference over any other body of land of equal extent, west of the Mississippi. Moreover, the Teche offered itself to explorers, settlers, and travelers as a primitive superhighway leading deep into south Louisiana’s often isolated interior—a role the bayou fulfilled until the advent of railroads and automobiles.

But the Teche’s significance also stems from something less tangible than geography or economics. For well over two centuries the bayou has intrigued locals and visitors alike, enticing them with a certain mystique, an intangible quality found less distinctly in rivals like the Lafourche, Ouachita, Tensas, Vermilion, Mermentau, and Sabine, among others. Louisiana’s first American governor, W. C. C. Claiborne, visited the Teche Country in 1806 and described it to President Thomas Jefferson as the most beautiful I ever beheld. Another nineteenth-century visitor declared, One may hunt the world over and never find another bayou Teche; it is a gem dropped in Paradise. [S]he is a Louisiana grande dame of superb attributes, penned New Orleans author Harnett T. Kane, who in almost haiku tone added, The Teche smiles and moves in serenity. This allure, partly aesthetic and partly mythic, explains why the Teche has been featured so often in novels, short stories, poems, songs, paintings, photographs, and films.

The bayou, for example, appears in the romantic, idealized paintings of Adrien Persac, Meyer Strauss, William Henry Buck, John La Farge, Charles Giroux, Joseph Rusling Meeker, and Alexander John Drysdale, as well as in the more naturalistic Reconstruction-era sketches of Alfred Waud. In recent decades the Teche has been featured in the works of George Rodrigue and Melissa Bonin (both of whom grew up along the bayou), and in those of Hunt Slonem (who today owns Albania, a stunning antebellum plantation home on the Teche at Jeanerette). The bayou has appeared in films such as Columbia Pictures’ 1942 short documentary Cajuns of the Teche, whose priceless imagery offsets its at times historically incorrect narration. More recently it figured in the documentaries Native Waters: A Chitimacha Recollection (2011), about the Native American tribe living on the bayou’s banks at Charenton; Le Bijou sur le Bayou Teche (2013), about the survival of Louisiana French along the waterway; and In the Mind of the Maker (2016), about wooden boat-building on the Teche.

Likewise, various musical compositions have alluded to the Teche. The earliest known reference dates to 1856, when composer Euphemia E. Fleurot published sheet music for Souvenir du Teche Polka, dedicated to her pupil, Miss Lelia Delahoussaye, Franklin, La. In 1911 famed American composer John Phillip Sousa scored The Belle of Bayou Teche with lyricist O. E. Lynne. Written in now offensive Negro dialect, the lyrics presented a hodgepodge of Old South clichés:

On de lazy sleepin’ bayou,

On de live oak-shaded bayou,

Wha’ de wateh-spideh spins his silber mesh.

Wha’ de sugah cane am growin’,

Wha’ us darkies was a hoein’,

Dere I met my love, de Belle of Bayou Teche.³

The bayou has been mentioned most frequently, however, in south Louisiana’s accordion-and-fiddle-driven Cajun music tradition. Two distinct Cajun songs, one by Columbus Frugé and the other by Nathan Abshire, bear the title Valse de Bayou Teche (Bayou Teche Waltz). In Frugé’s (1929) the singer rebukes his mistress, "Si t’aurais voulu m’écouter, chère / toi tu s’rais au Bayou Teche avec ton nég’, Chérie! (If you would have listened to me, dear / you’d be on Bayou Teche with your lover, dear!). In Abshire’s (1970), however, the accordionist pleads, Mon beau frère, viens donc m’voir, chèr / viens donc m’voir après mourir au Bayou Teche (My brother-in-law, come see me, dear / come see me dying on Bayou Teche). Other Teche-related compositions include Iry LeJeune’s Teche Special (1950), Austin Pitre’s Bayou Teche Two-Step (1960), Hadley Castille’s Maudit Bayou Teche (1989), BeauSoleil’s Le Belle de Bayou Teche (1994) (unrelated to Sousa’s melody), and Pope Huval’s Le Teche (2010). Many English-language songs also feature the waterway, among them Bayou Teche (1969) by Louisiana-born Nashville star Doug Kershaw, Along the Bayou Teche (2003) and Shadows on the Teche (2011), both by Mark Viator, and Back to Bayou Teche" (1992) by guitar virtuoso Sonny Landreth (notably covered by the Flying Burrito Brothers). At least three bands have called themselves Bayou Teche or have included the term in their names.⁴

Literature has drawn on Bayou Teche over the years as a setting for novels, short stories, and poems. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, described as for more than a century, the most famous poet in the English-speaking world, referred to the Teche in Evangeline, his 1847 epic poem about the expulsion of the Cajuns’ ancestors from Nova Scotia and their arrival in a new south Louisiana homeland. Generations of schoolchildren memorized Longfellow alongside Byron, Tennyson, and Shakespeare:

On the banks of the Teche are the towns of St. Maur and St. Martin.

There the long-wandering bride shall be given again to her bridegroom,

There the long-absent pastor regain his flock and his sheepfold.

Beautiful is the land, with its prairies and forests of fruit-trees;

Under the feet a garden of flowers, and the bluest of heavens

Bending above, and resting its dome on the walls of the forest.

They who dwell there have named it the Eden of Louisiana.

George Washington Cable referred to the bayou in his works, including The Creoles of Louisiana (1885), Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana (1887), and Strange True Stories of Louisiana (1889)—the latter of which included a phony 1822 memoir of a 1795 voyage up the Teche (sold to Cable as authentic by its apparent forger, French Creole author Sidonie de la Houssaye of Franklin). Kate Chopin used the bayou as the setting for A Gentleman of Bayou Teche, published in her short story collection Bayou Folk (1894). The waterway also appears in Alice Ilgenfritz Jones’s sentimental-historical romance Beatrice of Bayou Teche (1895); Robert Olivier’s historical-fiction trilogy Pierre of the Teche (1936), Tidoon: A Story of the Cajun Teche (1972), and Tinonc: Son of the Cajun Teche (1974); and Karen A. Bale and Kathleen Duey’s young reader’s novel Swamp: Bayou Teche, Louisiana, 1851 (1999), among others.

More recently the Teche has figured strongly in the best-selling Dave Robicheaux detective novels. In Crusader’s Cross (2005), for example, James Lee Burke, an author with New Iberia roots, wrote: I could see the gardens behind the Shadows, a plantation home built in 1831, and the receding corridor of oak and cypress trees along the banks of the Teche, a tidal stream that had been navigated by Spaniards in bladed helmets, French missionaries, displaced Acadians, pirates, Confederate and Yankee gun crews, and plantation revelers who toasted their own prosperity on paddle wheelers that floated through the night like candlelit wedding cakes.⁵

Another characteristic that helps explain the Teche’s allure is its cultural landscape, which outsiders have consistently viewed as exotic. From the colonial era onward, the bayou sliced through south Louisiana’s French-speaking interior—an enclave occupied by an enticing amalgam of Cajuns, Native Americans, and black, white, and mixed-race Creoles. While nauseating more prudish Anglo-Saxonist observers, the region’s striking foreignness appealed to nineteenth-century romantics and their appreciation for the gothic—found, for example, in the ominous ruins of plantation homes and sugarhouses, or in the melancholy groves of sprawling, twisted live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Later this same quality satisfied a nostalgia for the simplicity of a pre-modern golden age—one that never really existed, particularly for enslaved blacks.

In short, observers saw the Teche and the lands adjoining it as simultaneously fertile, accessible, prosperous, beautiful, and mysterious. But, importantly, the bayou also bore the cachet of appearing in Longfellow’s celebrated poem. It is true that Evangeline mentioned not only the Teche but also the Atchafalaya and the Lafourche. Yet Longfellow presented the Teche and its luxuriant banks as the Acadian exiles’ sublime goal, their Eden, as the poet himself wrote. Because of the immortal link between Longfellow and the Teche, today visitors find along the bayou at St. Martinville the Evangeline Oak and so-called Tomb of Evangeline; underneath the oak, overlooking the Teche, a bust of Longfellow; and a short distance upstream, the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site.

Evangeline belongs to the Teche. As New Iberia songsmith Alfred Dieudonne wrote mawkishly in 1929, Evangeline! Evangeline! You live forever on this stream!

It is unclear, however, when the bayou came to be known as the Teche. Did Native Americans give this name to the bayou prior to contact with Europeans? Or did Europeans name the waterway, perhaps borrowing a Native American word for the purpose? Before standardized spelling, colonial scribes rendered the bayou’s name variously, regarding no spelling as more correct than another: Tache, Tage, Tash, Techa, Teche, Tesche, Teich, Teichte, Teis, Tex, Texe, Teych, Teyche, Thecte, Theich, Theiche, Theis, Theix, Theiz, Thex, and Tieche. No doubt other variations exist in old documents. (The bayou also went by the name Rivière des Attakapas—the latter word itself having several spellings.)

The earliest known use of the word Teche dates to July 16, 1765. That month pioneer cattleman Jean-Baptiste Grevemberg wrote to colonial administrators in New Orleans, complaining about Acadian trespassers and requesting formal title to his vacherie (ranch). In reply, the Spanish colony’s French administrators, Charles-Philippe Aubrey and Denis-Nicolas Foucault, granted Grevemberg title to land bounded by "la Rivière de Teiche."⁶

But why did anyone name the bayou Teche (no matter the word’s spelling) in the first place? Three rival etymologies explain, or attempt to explain, the term’s origin.

The most dubious of these etymologies appeared as early as 1859, when the Opelousas Courier newspaper authoritatively explained: Many suppose the name of our beautiful bayou to be of Indian origin. But such, however, is not the case. The stream was called after Edward Teche, the noted pirate, who is said to have had a rendezvous on Berwick’s Bay [near the mouth of the bayou]. Edward Teche, or Teach as his name is usually spelled, was none other than Blackbeard the Pirate. There is no evidence, however, that Blackbeard—who in the early 1700s terrorized the Caribbean and southern colonies of British America—ever marauded the Louisiana coast, much less on or near the Teche.

Another questionable etymology asserts that Teche is a corruption of Deutsch, the German word for German. Dating back at least as early as 1883, this explanation holds that the French or Spanish named the bayou Deutsch because of German settlers living along the waterway, and that over time Deutsch morphed into Teche. There were indeed Germans in the area; in 1779 Spanish military officer Francisco Bouligny wrote to Louisiana governor Bernardo de Gálvez from the Teche: I met four German families when I first crossed the Big River [the Atchafalaya] and they were in the greatest misery and unhappiness, so I told them to come here [to the Teche] and settle with the others [in my expedition].

The Deutsch theory is problematic, however, because the number of Germans living on the Teche was always negligible. Moreover, when the French and Spanish did encounter sizable numbers of Germans in south Louisiana, they did not use the German word Deutsch to describe them, but, naturally, the French and Spanish words Allemand and Alemán. Indeed, a Louisiana bayou on which many German pioneers did settle still bears the name Bayou des Allemands. (The original name of Patterson, located at the mouth of the Teche, was variously Dutch Settlement, Dutch Town, and Dutch Prairie. This could be regarded as evidence for the Deutsche theory, since Dutch and Deutsche sound similar and are in fact related terms. On closer inspection, however, such a theory would fall apart, because Patterson’s Dutch founders did not arrive on the bayou until the early 1800s, after the waterway’s name had been firmly established as Teche.)⁷

A more convincing explanation is that Teche derives from a local Native American word of the Chitimacha language meaning snake. This account appeared in print as early as 1922 in The Bayou and Its People, a promotional booklet issued by the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The booklet referred to the old Indian legend that the Teche came by its name because of an enormous serpent. . . . A 1927 issue of the Journal of American Folklore included a more detailed version of the legend: Bayou Teche . . . gets its name from an Indian legend, according to which the Indians came one day upon a monstrous snake, twisting and writhing and spitting forth fire; the tribe, with mighty shouts and great war cries, overcame it; this snake was the bayou, and the Indians gave to it the name ‘Tenche,’ signifying snake, which has now become Teche. . . .⁸

It is certainly true that the traditional Chitimacha name for Bayou Teche translates into English as Snake Bayou. The problem, however, is that Snake Bayou in Chitimachan is rendered qukx caqaad—neither element of which bears any resemblance to the word Teche. (Qukx means snake and caqaad means bayou.)⁹

Where, then, did the word Teche come from and why the need for it? There is, for example, no word for snake in any other Native American language spoken in the region (Attakapas, Choctaw, Houma, Koasati) that lends itself convincingly as the source of Teche.¹⁰

Faced with this puzzle, I developed two theories that attempt to explain the origin and meaning of Teche. I cannot prove either is correct, so they should be viewed with skepticism. First, I propose Teche might descend not from the Chitimacha word for snake, but from the Chitimacha word for another writhing, elongated, legless creature, the worm. In Chitimacha the word for worm is tcī’c or tcīīc, pronounced cheesh. This pronunciation bears some resemblance to Teche. Indeed, noted Chitimacha benefactor and basket collector Mary McIlhenny Bradford, when recording the name of a certain Chitimacha basket design called tcī’cmîc, or worm-track, spelled it tesh mich, so much did tcī’c sound like tesh to her ear. But, again, the tribe’s use of qukx caqaad to signify the bayou ultimately suggests a non-Chitimacha source for Teche.¹¹

My second theory, therefore, is that Teche derives from a Native American word of Caddo origin meaning friend—and that Teche is a Spanish colonial term for Texas. I developed this explanation after reading a Spanish colonial manuscript from 1690. That centuries-old document recorded the first encounter between Spanish explorers and the indigenous peoples of what is now coastal southeast Texas. Prepared only a year after the event it described, the manuscript stated: "As soon as the Indians became aware of our presence, they made for the wood. . . . The Indian who served as our guide himself entered the wood, and called to the others, declaring that we were friends, and that they should have no fear. Some of them—and among these was their captain—came out and embraced us, saying ‘thechas! thechas!’ which means ‘friends! friends!’"¹²

"Thechas" subsequently became the name by which the Spanish referred to the entire region, as anthropologist John R. Swanton explained:

This word appears in the forms texas, texias, tejas, tejias, teysas, techan, etc., and hence these Indians were called Texas Indians and the word was subsequently applied to the [Mexican] province of Texas and taken over by the American colonists as that of the Republic and later State of Texas. The x in this word was not, however, pronounced by the Spaniards as it is in English. Sometimes it was made equivalent to [the] Spanish j . . . but I have usually found that in the early Spanish narratives it is employed for the English sh, for which the Spanish language provides no specific sign. . . . I, therefore, believe that the original pronunciation of Texas was Tayshas, although . . . it may have been Taychas.¹³

Mexican priest and scholar José Antonio Pichardo made the same observation in the early nineteenth century, decades before Texas broke away from Mexico to become an independent nation and then an American state. As Pichardo noted, "The word Texas itself some write with an x and others with ch, Techas, and its correct pronunciation will be that which a Frenchman would give it, reading this word as if it were the French Techas [my italics]. Pichardo further explained that Spanish missionaries who knew the language of those Indians [in Texas] wrote with an x that which the Indians pronounced with the ch. This is seen in their [the missionaries’] original manuscripts."¹⁴

Noting the similarity of Techas (and its alternate spellings) to Teche (and its alternate spellings), I propose that Spanish explorers named Bayou Teche for the Mexican province of Texas. Thus, the name Teche would derive not from a Chitimacha word meaning snake, but from a word in another Native American language, Caddo, meaning friend.

If this seems fanciful, consider that the Spanish viewed all Louisiana west of the Mississippi as Spanish territory—that is, as an extension of the Mexican province of Texas. In fact, a 1757 Spanish map wishfully showed the province of Texas stretching all the way to the Mississippi. Consider also that the Spanish capital of Texas stood from 1729 to 1770 in present-day Louisiana (near Natchitoches). Consider also that at one time or another the Spanish referred to the present-day Sabine and Mermentau rivers, located in southwest Louisiana, as the Rio Mexicano (Mexican River). In this context, it does not seem far-fetched to imagine the Spanish naming a major Louisiana bayou the Techas (Texas), which in time morphed into Teche.¹⁵

There are, however, other possible explanations. For instance, Teche might derive not from a Native American word, but from a French, Spanish, or even Afro-Caribbean term. (The word gumbo, for example—so strongly associated with south Louisiana cuisine—can be traced through the Caribbean to west Africa.) Indeed, a river in France bears the name Tèche, another the name Tech. Perhaps a French pioneer carried one of these names to the New World, christening the bayou after a homeland river? Like my Techas proposal, this is only a theory. Barring discovery of a smoking-gun document, we may never know the actual origin of the word Teche.¹⁶

As for the word bayou, scholars assert with authority that it comes from the Choctaw word bayok or bayuk (later rendered bok), meaning river or stream. Most bayous are slow, muddy, and relatively small waterways that become torrents only during significant rainfalls. Although most often associated with Louisiana, the word is used along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida and as far north as Missouri. Regardless, it is Louisiana that bears the nickname the bayou state. Here the word is applied frequently to rivers, streams, and sometimes even coulées (small water-filled gullies or ravines).¹⁷

Regarding other terms used in this book: Unless otherwise stated, Louisiana refers to the current state of Louisiana, not the entire Louisiana colony and territory that once made up about one-third of the continental United States. The term south Louisiana refers to the present-day Acadiana region, so-called because of its large Cajun population. When not referring to the Native American tribe of the same name, Attakapas, as well as Poste des Attakapas and Attakapas District, refer to a region of south-central Louisiana occupied roughly by the modern-day parishes of Vermilion, Lafayette, Iberia, St. Martin, and St. Mary. Similarly, when not referring to the Native American tribe or town of the same name, Opelousas, as well as Poste des Opelousas and Opelousas District, refer to a region of south-central Louisiana made up roughly by the modern-day parishes of St. Landry, Calcasieu, Cameron, Beauregard, Allen, Jefferson Davis, Evangeline, and Acadia (though in the context of this book I usually mean the section of the Opelousas poste or district closest to the Teche).

Appearing often in this book, the words Acadian, Cajun, and Creole also deserve explanation. In this book Acadian refers to eighteenth-century exiles from the Maritime Provinces of Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) who settled in south Louisiana, as well as to their offspring. Although deriving from Acadian, the word Cajun has a slightly different meaning, referring to descendants of the Acadian exiles and the several other ethnic groups with whom they intermarried on the semitropical frontier, such as the Spanish, French, and Germans.

1875 land map showing parcels along the Fausse Pointe oxbow extending forty linear arpents from the Teche. Some landowners on the map received their grants in the early