Louisiana Pastimes

Ancient Fishing Methods, the Hippo Bill, a Squirrel Stampede and Other Tales

Terry L. Jones PhD

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781439669341
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

Few states can match Louisiana in terms of rich history, colorful characters and strange occurrences. It was home to America's first mound builders, the birthplace of the nation's modern army and the scene of a dismaying number of natural disasters. Louisiana's story also includes the weird and bizarre. Fish and worms have rained from the sky, sea serpents have been spotted off its coast and Bigfoot is said to roam the woods. From stampeding squirrels and bayou hippos to Native American hunters and sunken galleons, this collection of tales will entertain anyone who enjoys outdoor adventures and offbeat history. Award-winning author Dr. Terry L. Jones has tapped into his broad knowledge of Louisiana and his own outdoor experiences to produce this engaging book.

1

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

The Natchitoches area has long been a popular destination for tourists and sportsmen. One visitor from France was especially intrigued at how the local people used trotlines to catch catfish.

The trotlines were, he wrote, “no more than fishing lines about [thirty-six feet] long. All along these lines, numerous other lines are tied about a foot apart. At the end of each line is a fish hook on which they put a bit of… dough or a small piece of meat. With this method they do not fail to catch fish weighing more than fifteen or twenty pounds.”

The tourist was André Pénicaut, and he visited Natchitoches three hundred years ago. His journal reminds us that many of our “modern” fishing techniques were actually developed by Indians long ago. The Indians’ methods of taking fish were as varied as they were ingenious and would be recognized by any fisherman today.

Hooks and lines were popular, with hooks being made from bone or deer antler and line from deer sinew. Archaeologists have found three-thousand-year-old tear-shaped, polished stones with holes or grooves in the top that are believed to have been weights for nets or trotlines.

The Chitimacha of South Louisiana used wooden slat traps and gill and hoop nets. The latter were made from rabbit vine and were attached to round wooden frames and placed at the mouths of bayous.

The Chitimacha’s favorite fishing technique was to swim underwater with small nets made from hemp. These nets were about three feet long and three feet in diameter and had elastic green cane fixed on each side to serve as a spring.

Some modern fishermen continue to practice the old tactic of gigging, or spearing, fish. Author’s collection.

A number of men lined abreast across a long pond and then swam underwater, keeping their nets open in front of them by pulling the green cane back with both hands. The men stayed underwater until they either ran out of breath or their nets were full of fish. When the nets were full, they let go of the cane, and it sprang shut to close the opening.

One Frenchman who participated in this type of fishing wrote: “I have been engaged half a day at a time…and half drowned in the diversion— when any of us was so unfortunate as to catch water snakes in our sweep, and emptied them ashore, we had the ranting voice of our friendly posse comitatus, whooping against us, till another party was so unlucky as to meet with the like misfortune. During this exercise, the women are fishing ashore with coarse baskets, to catch the fish that escaped our nets.”

Spearing fish with harpoons or bows and arrows was also quite effective, with Indians sometimes using torches to hunt at night. Harpoon shafts were usually made from ash, cypress or willow because they float. When a hit was made, the fish quickly became tired from dragging the buoyant shaft across the surface, and if the fisherman missed he could retrieve his harpoon.

My Uncle Preston Copeland told me stories of doing the same thing as a kid on Corney Creek with a carbide lantern and gig. And several years ago, I accompanied Terry Crum and his Fort Necessity friends on a gar-gigging expedition in the Mississippi River. Just like Indians of old, Crum and his friends hurled cypress-shafted harpoons into the gar and then retrieved them once the fish grew tired.

The Choctaw and other tribes sometimes made poison by pounding up buckeyes, green walnuts and hickory nuts and mixing it into the water. The poison affected the fish’s gills and suffocated them. Once they floated to the top of the water, the Indians scooped them up by hand.

Growing up in Winn Parish, I knew a number of people who used buckeyes to poison fish (illegally) in Big Creek and Dugdemona River, but I never witnessed it personally.

An alternate method to suffocating fish was to muddy the water by having people stomp through a shallow pool and stir up the thick bottom sediment. One Spanish explorer in Mississippi wrote that the Indians “roiled the water with the mud of the waters and the fish, as if stupefied would come to the surface, and they caught as many as they wished.”

My mother recalled going to barrow pits near her Mississippi home during the Depression and using the same method to catch fish. Her father put on rubber boots and churned up the mud while she and her siblings scooped up the small bream that came to the surface.

When it comes to fishing, there’s truly nothing new under the sun.

2

ALLIGATOR TALES

Louisiana has long captured America’s imagination with its beautiful bayous, delicious cuisine and abundant wildlife. Television shows such as Swamp People have only increased that interest—particularly in Louisiana’s famous alligators.

Stories about the alligator (or “crocodiles,” as the French called them) began to appear in print soon after the Sieur d’Iberville established the Louisiana colony in 1699. In fact, one of the first mentions of our alligator can be found in Iberville’s diary. While exploring Bayou Manchac, he wrote: “We see a large quantity of crocodiles. I killed a small one, eight feet long. They are very good to eat.”

André Pénicaut accompanied Iberville on the expedition, and he claimed that the Riviere-aux-Chiens was one of the first places the French named, “because a crocodile ate up one of our dogs there.” This stream is probably modern-day Riviere aux Chenes, which forms the western boundary of St. Bernard Parish.

Le Page DuPratz, another early explorer, frequently mentioned the alligator in his memoirs. According to DuPratz, the reptiles were not only widespread but also downright huge. “Among other things I cannot omit to give an account of a monstrous large alligator I killed with a musquet ball.… We measured it, and found it to be nineteen feet long, its head three feet and a half long…at the belly it was two feet two inches thick.…M. Mehane told me, he had killed one that was twenty-two feet long.” If Mehane’s gator was measured accurately, it would have broken the current world record of nineteen feet, two inches.

The author of an 1854 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine also commented on the large size of the gators. He claimed a skull was found with jaws that opened up five feet and that a man once killed an alligator in Pascagoula Bay that measured twenty-one feet long. The writer also mentioned that the famous painter James J. Audubon killed one in the Three Rivers area that measured seventeen feet.

This same author claimed that the alligator’s ability to survive long periods of time without food “almost exceeds belief.” While living in Concordia Parish, he received a letter from a European scientist requesting a live alligator to study. The author put the word out, and gators soon started arriving at his doorstep—literally. In the dead of night, a neighbor tied to his porch an alligator “whose huge jaws…opened wide enough to swallow any philosopher who would dare to interfere with his habits or dental fixtures.”

He finally acquired two alligators he thought would fit the scientist’s needs and simply put them in a crate with air holes and shipped them to Europe. Traveling by steamboat and train, it took the critters nearly five months to reach their destination. They arrived in good condition even though “in all that time, lived on else than faith, sunshine, and the dews of heaven.”

Louisiana alligator. Author’s collection.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, alligators seemed to have flourished all over Louisiana, but writers frequently mentioned their abundance in Red River. One author quoted Audubon as saying the number of gators there was “almost beyond conception. He says he has seen hundreds at once, the smaller riding on the backs of the larger, groaning and bellowing like so many mad bulls about to meet in fight.”

In 1876, manufacturers in New York and New Jersey began purchasing Louisiana alligator skins to make boots, shoes and purses, and other companies bought alligator oil for use in machinery. As a result, professional hunters started killing large numbers of the reptiles. On June 3, 1882, the Lafayette Advertiser reported, “Three persons residing in the parish of Assumption, last year killed 9000 alligators, saved the oil and sold the hides. The price of the hides is seventy-five cents apiece.”

The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries estimates that from 1880 to 1933 approximately 3.5 million Louisiana alligators were killed for their skins (an average of 64,815 per year). The number dropped significantly to 414,126 (18,005 per year) between 1939 and 1960. A growing concern that the Louisiana gator might be killed to extinction led officials to initiate a statewide ban on hunting alligators in 1962.

Ten years later, the gator population had rebounded enough that a commercial season was reopened. Today, thanks to conservation efforts, there are probably more alligators in Louisiana than there were one hundred years ago.

3

LAST ISLAND’S LAST DAYS

August can be cruel. In modern times, it has spawned hurricanes Camille, Andrew and Katrina that devastated Louisiana and killed hundreds of people. An equally destructive, but lesser-known, storm was the 1856 hurricane that destroyed Last Island.

Last Island, or Isle Dernière, was the westernmost, or “last,” island in the Gulf’s Timbalier barrier chain. It stretched more than twenty miles and had beautiful white sand beaches, gaming establishments and a village of about one hundred houses. Last Island also was home to the Trade Wind Hotel, a swanky resort frequented by New Orleans’ upper class.

In early August 1856, hundreds of guests were enjoying the island when the Gulf began to act strangely. People noticed that the water seemed to have a bulge on the horizon and that the “bump” was moving closer to shore.

The bulging horizon was caused by a hurricane, and it was moving north. As the storm approached, the seas around Last Island became heavier. The ferocity of the waves fascinated the vacationers, and they stood for hours watching them crash onto the beach. Robert McAllister, a young Presbyterian minister, wrote, “We did not know then as we did afterwards that the voice of those many waves was solemnly saying to us, ‘Escape for thy life.’”

One man reported that on August 9 “a roaring noise was heard in the distance, and the cattle continued for hours walking nervously to and fro around the enclosure, and lowing in a plaintiff way.” A blood-red sun set that evening, and the sky had a strange greenish hue.

The hurricane of 1856, its track shown here, devastated Last Island and much of South Louisiana. Wikimedia Commons.

According to legend, the guests of the Trade Wind Hotel ignored the warning signs and enjoyed a dance that night. By noon the next day, the wind and waves had increased in fury and rain was pounding the island.

The Star, a ship that serviced Last Island, was scheduled to dock, and a number of people planned to take it back to the mainland. But the Star was unable to reach the island, and the now-worried vacationers realized they were trapped.

When the unnamed hurricane slammed ashore about 4:00 p.m. on August 10, a storm surge swept over the island and carried away most of the people and buildings. One survivor wrote, “Men, women and children were seen running in every direction, in search of some means of salvation.”

McAllister and his friends sought shelter in a house, but the roof suddenly flew off, and the four outside walls gave way. Surprisingly, no debris fell on them. “Nothing could fall,” McAllister explained. “Everything that was in motion went horizontally.”

Realizing they had to escape the rising waters, the small group crawled on all fours across a walkway to a nearby levee, where they held tight to the wooden frame of a derelict windmill. They spent the long night dodging logs and other debris that rushed toward them in the swirling water. On one occasion, a waterspout touched down and spun the wooden frame on which they clung around the windmill’s metal pipe.

By dawn it was over, and McAllister and his fellow survivors began walking toward the village. The scene that greeted them was shocking.

“The jeweled and lily hand of a woman was seen protruding from the sand, and pointing toward heaven; farther, peered out from the ground, as if looking up to us, the regular features of a beautiful girl.…And, more affecting still, there was the form of a sweet babe even yet embraced by the stiff and bloodless arms of a mother.”

The entire island had been swept clean, and there was no trace of the Trade Wind Hotel. Of the one hundred or so houses, McAllister reported, “Not one was left, nay not a sill nor sleeper, not any part of their foundations to indicate that buildings had once been there.”

It is believed that the Last Island hurricane was a Category 4 with 150 mile-per-hour winds. Estimates of the death toll range from 140 to 320, with some of the bodies being washed six miles inland. Among those killed were the state’s lieutenant governor and the speaker of the house.

The Last Island hurricane also dumped more than thirteen inches of rain on New Orleans, flooded Plaquemines Parish, destroyed every house in Abbeville and sank the steamer Nautilus with eighty-six people on board. The sole survivor managed to cling to a cotton bale and float ashore.

When the water drained off Last Island several days later, rescuers found that the storm surge had stripped away all of the vegetation and split the island into the five smaller ones that today are known as the Isles Dernières.

4

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

The head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service declared in a news release that the “great game of hoarding” ammunition by “greedy individuals” was unsportsmanlike. “I hope that all outdoor writers will make an appeal to good sportsmanship and fair play, and start a campaign to get local sports groups to collect these large ammunition stocks and redistribute them equitably.”

During our ammunition shortage, hoarding and speculation seemed to be commo...