Jim Bradshaw: Was Bayou Teche named for a pirate?

If you read enough stuff that was written a good while ago, you will eventually run across the claim that Bayou Teche was named for Edward Teach, the infamous pirate better known as Blackbeard. I most recently came across it in an 1868 piece in the New Orleans Crescent describing the discovery of salt at Avery Island, which was then called Petite Anse Island, for its little wooded coves.

The unidentified writer claims that the island “was inhabited at an early period in the history of Louisiana … when Teach (or Black Beard, as he was called), the celebrated pirate traded up Bayou Teche (which was named after him}. … It was well known and inhabited by quite a number of persons — fishermen, smugglers, and pirates.”

A version of that story had appeared in the Opelousas Courier in 1859, claiming that “the noted pirate … is said to have had a rendezvous on Berwick’s Bay.”

I wouldn’t wager the ranch on the truth of either of those stories.

To begin with, it is unlikely that Blackbeard ever heard of Bayou Teche, let alone traded on it. He was notorious in the West Indies and lower Atlantic Coast, not the Gulf of Mexico. Second, he was killed in North Carolina in 1718, which was about 50 years before the Acadians began to settle around St. Martinville (1765). There would have been precious few people to trade with.

The historian George R. Stewart, who was a founding member of the American Name Society and authored books such as Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945), theorized that “Teche” is, “probably a French rendering of Deutsch, the name by which the German colonists of the area would have named their stream.”

The problem I have with that is that the Germans who came earliest to Louisiana lived on the Mississippi River (mostly at or near Des Allemands), and didn’t come in any large numbers to the Teche country early enough to give it a name.

Local historian Shane Bernard agrees with that assessment in his history of the bayou (Teche: A History of Louisiana’s Most Famous Bayou, University Press of Mississippi, 2016). “The numbers of Germans living on the Teche was always negligible,” he points out. He does note that an early name for the Teche community of Patterson was Dutch Settlement, but that “Patterson’s Dutch founders did not arrive on the bayou until the early 1800s, after the waterway’s name had been firmly established.”

I like the hypothesis that Teche comes from “tenche”, a Chitimacha word meaning “snake.” The Chitimacha legend that is still told goes like this:

“Many years ago, in the days of the Tribe’s strength, there was a huge and venomous snake. This snake was so large, and so long, that its size was not measured in feet, but in miles. This enormous snake had been an enemy of the Chitimacha for many years, because of its destruction to many of their ways of life. One day, the Chitimacha chief called together his warriors, and had them prepare themselves for a battle with their enemy. In those days, there were no guns that could be used to kill this snake. All they had were clubs and bows and arrows, with arrowheads made of large bones from the garfish.

“Of course, a snake over ten miles long could not be instantly killed. The warriors fought courageously to kill the enemy, but the snake fought just as hard to survive. As the beast turned and twisted in the last few days of a slow death, it broadened, curved and deepened the place wherein his huge body lay.

"The Bayou Teche is proof of the exact position into which this enemy placed himself when overcome by the Chitimacha warriors.”

Bernard has a problem with that because the Chitimacha words for “snake bayou” do not sound like “Teche.” He has two alternate theories about the origin of the name, both of which he admits “should be viewed with skepticism” because neither can be proven.

He suggests that the name may have indeed come from the Chitimacha, but not for its word for snake. He says the word for “another wiggling creature,” the worm, is “cheesh,” which sounds more like Teche.

His other theory is that the name comes from the Caddo Indian word for “friend,” as interpreted by Spanish missionaries who came into the area from Texas.

I still like the snake story.

I don’t think that many missionaries came from Texas to the Teche country, and I doubt that any tale (and the resulting bayou name) would be kept alive for generation after generation if it was about a lowly worm, even if it was a really big one.

But I also agree with Bernard’s conclusion that there is no definite and fully convincing record, and that “barring discovery of a ‘smoking gun’ document, we may never know the actual origin of the word Teche.”

That’s true, but I am willing to bet that if such a document is ever found it will have nothing to do with Blackbeard.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.