Jim Bradshaw: Steamboat ride to the Atchafalaya offered adventure

In the middle 1800s the main route from New Orleans to Bayou Teche, Bayou Courtableau and other points in south Louisiana took steamboats up the Mississippi River to Plaquemine in Iberville Parish, where the boat made a sometimes-treacherous turn into Bayou Plaquemine and followed its winding, stump-filled course to the Atchafalaya.
The trip took a traveler through a wilderness that was both rugged and beautiful, and was filled enough with a sense of adventure that one diarist suggested that, “If you reach Plaquemines in safety, and the boat does not blow up between that and New Orleans, you may consider that luck and Providence have smiled on you in a very peculiar manner.”
And that was before the boat got to the worst part.
An unidentified traveler on the steamer R. C. Oglesby wrote in November 1849, that “few can imagine from mere description the remarkable character of the route” down the Atchafalaya to Berwick Bay.
“One might pass over it a thousand times, and still find much to interest him,” the traveler recorded.
“The banks of the Atchafalaya are low, and the forests on either side are seldom broken by glades. Occasionally a log cabin is seen in a small opening, surrounded by tall trees, and occasionally wood piles on the banks invite the attention of steamboats.
"Once in a while a stubborn snag shows its bruised head above the water, inviting steamboats to keep a proper distance.”
At Grand River, “the willows on each bank nearly reached the boat” as it “raked one shore and ran but a short distance from the other.”
It was dark when they ran down Bayou Sorrell, “the banks of which at some places are clothed with a forest as dark and dense as those of Brazil.”
“The night shut in and the stars above and torch lights on our bows revealed to us the wild scenery around. On the low banks on each side stood heavy cypress and other forest trees whose extended boughs were clothed with hanging moss, their tall trunks stood as silent as night sentinels, and beyond them an impenetrable darkness obscured the night.
“Gloom and silence reigned around, broken only by our wild torchlights, and the puffing and hideous [whistle] of the steamboat, which made the forest ring as it rushed into its dark retreats. The still waters and the calm sky contrasted strongly with the dismal forest, the torch and shrill whistle. All together the scene was wild and dismal, but full of interest.”
The writer was apparently being facetious when he described the trip through Lake Chicot as “particularly delightful.”
“If you pass through this lake in the night, and the boat contains a heavy cargo of sugar and molasses, your poor craft will labor and groan as though it were running the gauntlet between death and destruction,” he wrote.
“The boat thumps against a snag as though in a mad fit she were attempting to bash her own brains out — and then shortly after strikes a log which rakes the whole length of the keel, and soon a stump of a cypress knee gives her a solid thump in the side and tells her to stand over.
"Thus, your steamer, amidst stumps, logs and snags clambers over the lake.”
Two other boats, the Meteor and Banner had both run aground in the lake, and, the writer said, “had it not been for the Vesta that took a portion of our cargo … there would have been three boats and three cargoes of sugar and molasses stuck in the lake at once, and as the water was falling … on account of the north winds we should have been obliged to remain there until a change of winds, or a rise in the Mississippi might come to our rescue.”
The writer thought there had to be a better way to get to and from New Orleans.
“It would be a blessing … if a Chinese wall could be built across Grand Lake, and an everlasting dam could be thrown across Plaquemine. Our citizens would then be compelled to build a railroad to the Mississippi which would obviate all of those difficulties on our present communication with New Orleans,” he wrote.
That was mostly wishful thinking. It would be more than 30 years before the railroad reached from New Orleans to Berwick Bay.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.