The Southwest Louisiana Historical Association's Newsletter

Imperial Calcasieu Notes

November 2003                           Vol. 7 No.4                         Kathie Bordelon, Editor

                       

 

Winter Meeting

 

The winter meeting of the Southwest Louisiana Historical Association will be held on Monday, November 17, 2003, in the Carnegie Branch Library. The meeting will begin at 7:00 p.m. Parking is available across the street from the library. Refreshments will be served. 

 

The speakers for the evening will be Mrs. Lauretta Fluitt, Mrs. Lola Mitchell and Mr. Harry Methvin of DeQuincy. They will be discussing different aspects of DeQuincy history, including the development of the wood naval stores industry and the recent centennial celebration.

 

Please attend and support our association!

                                                           

Fall Meeting Report

 

The United States was at the right place at the right time when it made the “deal of a lifetime” known as the Louisiana Purchase.  Dr. Carolyn DeLatte, head of the History Department at McNeese State University, addressed the complex issues surrounding the Louisiana Purchase at the fall meeting of the Southwest Louisiana Historical Association.  Dr. DeLatte discussed the lucky events and the unique situation that brought about the purchase.

 

The Louisiana Purchase resulted from a series of developments in Europe and Saint Domingue, now known as Haiti.  In 1800, Napoleon struggled to re-establish France’s foreign empire, lost during the Seven Years War.  Napoleon’s first objective was to retrieve the Louisiana Colony, ceded to Spain in 1762 to keep it from the English.  Then Napoleon sent an army to occupy Louisiana, but first the army stopped at the French island of Saint Domingue to put down a slave revolt.

 

The French army quashed the revolt, but a yellow fever epidemic decimated the men, including the commanding general.  Before Napoleon could send reinforcements, winter set in. 

 

England, which took Canada from France in the Seven Years War, threatened to declare war again.  Napoleon could whip any army on land, but he could not whip the British Navy.  Meanwhile, in the United States, President Thomas Jefferson became alarmed at the news that Spain ceded Louisiana to the French.  Jefferson knew Napoleon would make a bad neighbor.  Until now, Spanish officials allowed Americans to use the Mississippi River to transport timber and farm products and to store these materials in the warehouses of New Orleans until they could be sold.  Napoleon might forbid this practice.

 

Jefferson sent envoys to Paris to attempt to buy the city of New Orleans.  Control of New Orleans meant control of the Mississippi and a guarantee that the western states would have a place to deposit their goods.

 

Napoleon, who felt that he could not defend Louisiana in the coming war with England, decided to frustrate the English by selling the entire colony to the United States.  Jefferson’s envoys held no authority to buy the whole colony, but nonetheless seized the opportunity and pulled off the most important real estate transaction in history.

 

“The United States,” Dr. DeLatte concluded, “was lucky enough to be at the right spot at the right time.”

  

New Historical Markers in the Works

                                                                       

The Cameron Parish Police Jury approved the Association’s request  to erect two historical markers in their parish. The markers will indicate the Gulf Biologic Station and the Calcasieu River Lighthouse. The Association will place the markers  along the road leading to the jetties. This road is midway between the former locations of these two historic sites.

 

The Executive Board will travel to Cameron to meet with the parish administrator and choose the exact location for the markers.

 

The Association will hold a  dedication ceremony after the markers are installed.

 

Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps

 

The following excerpts are from Dr. John R. Hebert’s introduction to Charting Louisiana.

 

Two centuries ago, a chapter ended for European designs on the North American continent, while a new chapter opened for a youthful United States. The occasion was the historic purchase, in 1803, of the vast province called by the French “LA Louisiane” and by the Spanish, “La Luisiana.” American diplomats in Paris, at the request of visionary President Thomas Jefferson, successfully negotiated the purchase of the immense territory extending from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and from the Mississippi River to beyond the Rocky Mountains. For the price of $15 million, the young nation had suddenly doubled its size. This moment, a watershed event in the annals of American history, marked the beginning of the westward thrust in the country’s formation and a corresponding shift in national attention from the Atlantic seaboard to the mostly uncharted interior of the continent. The Purchase also represented a cultural shift, as America’s Anglo-Protestant society now found itself aligned with Louisiana’s post-colonial Latin and Roman Catholic culture.

 

In order to celebrate this significant milestone, The Historic New Orleans Collection has pursued for several years the ambitious goal of publishing an atlas that depicts Louisiana’s history through maps. Portions of that history are well documented in textual records, books, newspapers, and countless journal articles. Equally valuable –  but less well-known, understood, and used – are thousands of maps found in archives in the United States and abroad. These documents trace the discovery, colonization, and development of the region from its first charting in the 16th century. The cartographic record makes clear the geographical, historical, economic, and cultural importance of Louisiana, from the pre-colonial explorations of Soto and LaSalle to a 20th century offshore oil survey. Early maps show us the initial European conceptions of the land and its people and point to the influence of Native American language and descriptions in the names of places and geographical features. These maps also speak to the diffusion of information across Europe, as rival cartographers strove to present the very latest news about the American continent to an eager public. In the decades and centuries that followed, generations of mapmakers sketched and inked the story of Louisiana as settlers flocked into the Mississippi Valley, founded towns and cities, connected them with roads, rails, and telegraph wires, and cultivated the surrounding lands. Not only do these maps contain an extraordinary amount of information, they are often breathtaking works of art. Yet despite their value as historical documents and the widespread general interest in and appreciation of maps, there was no existing atlas that reproduced the important maps of Louisiana and its distinctive parts. Several noteworthy cartographic works regarding Louisiana have been published, but they are limited in size and scope. Accordingly, we saw the need for a new work that explores this epic history by using maps as focal points. The Historic New Orleans Collection, the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and archives in France, Spain, Great Britain, and Mexico all contributed maps for the atlas. Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps features an unprecedented compilation of 193 significant manuscript and printed maps illustrating the development of Louisiana from the early 16th century to the present.

 

Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps is available for $95.00 from The Historic New Orleans Collection, 533 Royal Street, New Orleans, LA 70130, (504) 523-4662, or special ordered  from local bookstores

 

Announcements

 

Maude Reid’s recipe cookbooks, located in the McNeese Archives and Special Collections Department, are featured in this new book from Johns Hopkins University Press:  Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

 

We have a web site! Pati Threatt, Assistant Archivist at the McNeese Archives, will serve as webmaster. She has designed a beautiful new Internet site www.swlahistory.org. Pati welcomes suggestions for new links or other comments. Call Pati at 475-5731or email her at: pthreatt@mcneese.edu.
 

The Association has designed and printed a new brochure to promote our mission.  We will distribute copies of the brochure at the November meeting.  Please take a few and share them with anyone interested in joining us.  The Board will place the brochures at strategic locations around town, such as the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Imperial Calcasieu Museum, local libraries, and the Arts and Humanities Council.

 

 

Notable Men and Women of Louisiana

 

 Andre Penicaut

(9th article in a series of 20)  

By Truman Stacey


Andre Penicaut, Louisiana’s first historian, was born in La Rochelle, in France, about 1680. In his teens he was apprenticed as a carpenter, and he must have been an apt student because at age 18 he was selected to accompany Pierre Le Moyne D’Iberville’s expedition that was to establish the French colony of Louisiana.

 

In October of 1698 he sailed aboard La Marin, a 32-gun frigate commanded by the Count de Surgeres, the second ship of D’Iberville’s small squadron. After an uneventful voyage the two ships made landfall at Cat Island and Ship Island near Biloxi Bay on January 6, 1699.
 

As the 18-year-old stood on the deck of La Marin and gazed ashore at the little-known continent, inhabited by rare beasts and savage men, he must have felt a thrill of adventure. And adventure he was to have. It was to be his lot to travel far and to witness great events during the 21 years he was to live in Louisiana. Because of his skill as a ship’s carpenter he was assigned to almost all of D’Iberville’s forays into the interior. Travel was by water, and there was always a boat to be repaired or a rude fort to be built. Carpenters were valuable men. He helped to build the first post at Old Biloxi as well as the new fort on the Mobile River.
 

Early in his stay in the colony he showed an aptitude for the languages of the Indians and thus became an interpreter for many of the pow-wows the French leaders had with leaders of the native tribes living along the banks of the Mississippi River. He also was a member of a number of raiding parties launched by the French to punish tribes which had killed Frenchmen, probably at the urgings of rival English traders.
 

Being alert and observant he made himself familiar with the customs, way of life and folklore of the natives. In addition to being alert and observant he began a journal to describe his adventures. This journal was to become the first published history of French Louisiana.
 

One of his early adventures occurred in 1700 when D’Iberville sent Charles Pierre Le Sueur to explore the upper reaches of the Mississippi River. Penicaut was a member of the party. They paddled upriver as far as the Blue Earth River in present-day Minnesota, until the river iced over in

 September.
 

The party built a rude fort where they spent the winter and almost starved, until they learned to subsist on buffalo meat. Penicaut later wrote that they killed and butchered about 500 of these big animals during the winter. “When we got used to that kind of food,” he later wrote, “it made us quite fat and there were no more sick among us.”
 

After the ice melted they moved upriver and found a large deposit of copper on a hillside. They spent 21 days digging out ore and brought it to Biloxi on their return.
 

When Louis Juchereau de St. Denis made his historic “invasion” of Texas in 1712, Penicaut was a member of the party that traveled to the Spanish post of San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande River. He later wrote of St. Denis’ arrest and imprisonment in Mexico City, and how he talked his way out of that dilemma and returned to Louisiana with a beautiful Spanish wife.   
 

Penicaut was married some time before 1708 to Marguerite Catherine Prevot, and their two children, Andre Rene and Jacque, were baptized by the post chaplain in 1708 and 1710, respectively.
 

He continued his services to the various governors of the colony, assisted in settling newcomers and marking out land concessions along the Mississippi.
 

In 1721, however, he began to suffer from an inflammation of the eyes and as his sight deteriorated he decided to return to France for treatment. All treatments were fruitless, however, and he never regained full use of his eyes.
 

As a means of attracting the attention of French officialdom in the hopes of gaining a pension for his years of service to the Crown, Penicaut completed his memoirs and submitted them as evidence.  Historians have been unable to discover if he was successful in his venture, or how long he continued to live or how he died.

 

His memoirs live after him, however, and they form one of the most important documents concerning the early history of the colony. No other man of the times contributed so much to our present knowledge of Louisiana history.
 

Many subsequent historians have used the information from his memoirs. Among them have been Father Charlevoix, one of the first travel writers of the area; as well as Louisiana historian Charles Gayarre, Peter J. Hamilton, writing of early Mobile; Henry Gravier and Grace King.
Ethnologists John R. Swanton and Fredick W. Hodge gleaned much of their data on the native tribes of the Mississippi Valley from Penicaut’s memoirs.
 

Penicaut deserves his place in the pantheon of the chroniclers of early Louisiana.

  

Pierre Vial

(10th in a series of 20)
By Truman Stacey

 

The history of Colonial Louisiana is filled with colorful individuals from Henri di Tonti to Jim Bowie, but one of the most important of these adventurers has never gained a niche in its folklore.
 

Pierre Vial was born in the French province of Lyon at an uncertain time and of uncertain antecedents. There is no record of his arrival in Louisiana, but from remarks he later made it has been deduced that he had been a trapper on the Red and Missouri Rivers before the American Revolution. Other data on his earlier activities are mostly conjecture.
 

He made his name in history as the man who opened up the Santa Fe Trail.
During his trapping days Vial had gained an intimate knowledge of the native tribes west of the Mississippi and for the most part had been able to travel among them safely. When his travels happened to take him to San Antonio in 1789, it was at the right moment.
 

After Louisiana was ceded to Spain by France in 1762, the Marquis de Rubi was sent from Mexico City to inspect the new area. In his report on his mission he recommended a series of military forts forming a line from La Bahia in Texas to the Gulf of California on the west. The capital of Texas was also moved from Robeline in present-day Louisiana to San Antonio.
 

That left Santa Fe as the northern tip of Spanish civilization in the Southwest, and left it isolated except for communications with Chihuahua 600 miles to the south. Communications between Santa Fe and San Antonio would be helpful to both communities.
 

Thus, Pierre Vial was hired to explore a direct route to Santa Fe. He proposed to make the trip alone, to travel through villages of friendly tribes until he reached the villages of the Comanches.
 

Vial departed San Antonio on October 5, 1786, with one companion, Cristobal de los Santos, and a pack horse with supplies. The pack horse drowned while crossing a stream and the supplies were lost. Living off the country, they crossed the Colorado and Brazos Rivers, visiting friendly tribes. On the way north Vial became ill, fell from his horse, and was delirious for two days. Still ill, he and de Santos pushed on, riding 150 miles to the villages of the Taovayas, where a medicine man healed him. They remained in the villages for two months while he recuperated.

 

Then the route was across Comanche and Apache country, new to Vial. In a number of villages he faced down threatening Comanches with his bravado and held a pow-wow in villages on the Pease River. The Comanches persuaded him to winter over in their camps.
 

In the spring he started out, accompanied by six Comanche chiefs and their retinues, crossed the Staked Plains and arrived in Santa Fe on May 26, 1787.
 

It was a staggering achievement. He had ridden nearly 1,200 miles, much of it through unexplored territory inhabited by tribes he had not visited before: Tonkawas, Wichitas, Apaches and then the Comanches.
 

A little over a year later, Vial was on the trail again, this time to explore routes from Santa Fe to Louisiana via Natchitoches, which he had visited earlier in his youth.
 

This time he was accompanied by several young Spaniards and an Indian escort. The party set out on June 24, 1788. Day after day the party rode east, spending some of the nights in Comanche lodges.

 

On June 25 they reached the Taovaya lodges on the Red River. The travelers rested for several days at this pleasant spot. They were approaching the end of their journey.

 

On August 12 they spent the night in a Bidai village. On August 20 they rode the last 25 miles to Natchitoches, where they received a royal welcome. They had ridden more than 900 miles from Santa Fe. Because of the friendliness of the Comanches and their escorts’ knowledge of the country, they were able to ride in safety, avoiding patches of badlands.
 

Vial was not finished, however. His orders were to proceed from Natchitoches to San Antonio to develop the quickest route. After enjoying French hospitality Vial and his party set out for San Antonio on September 18, 1788. Arriving at the village of Nacogdoches the party became ill, probably with malaria (all except Vial, who seems to have escaped this time) and stayed there 53 days until all had recovered. Then they made their way to San Antonio, having spent 37 days actually traveling. They arrived at San Antonio de Bexar on November 18, having covered 533 miles from Natchitoches. The round trip from Santa Fe to Natchitoches and then to San Antonio totaled nearly 1,500 miles.
 

But Vial was still not finished. Back in Santa Fe, he was ordered to open up a route from Santa Fe to St. Louis, which had by now outstripped Natchitoches as the entrepot on the Mississippi.

 

Departing Santa Fe on May 21, 1792, he and his party made good time until they reached the Canadian River where they were captured by a party of Kansas Indians, stripped of their clothing and threatened with death. One of the natives, however, recognized Vial and rescued him, hauling him into his lodge and stuffing food down his throat, since those who had eaten with the Indians were considered guests.

 

The Kansas held them naked for six weeks, but finally relented, clothed them, and set them on their way again, finally arriving at St. Louis on October 3. His route from Santa Fe covered 1,185 miles.
 

Wintering in St. Louis, Vial and his party set out once more, back to Santa Fe to open another trade route, one that was to become legendary in the history of the Southwest.
 

This first traverse of the famous trail took from June 14 to November 16, 1793, and proved that St. Louis and Santa Fe were much closer than had been realized either by the Spaniards or the encroaching Yankees.
 

Vial took up residence in Santa Fe and continued in the employ of Spanish officials as an Indian interpreter. He made a number of other trips to neighboring tribes as a diplomatic envoy of the Spanish crown.
 

Vial died in Santa Fe in 1814 and was buried there, leaving little or no estate. He was one of the makers of the history of Louisiana, Texas and New Mexico, and he should be remembered as such.

 

Copyright 2003 Southwest Louisiana Historical Association

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