Jim Bradshaw: Boat smelled bad but carried important cargo

In 1868 Joseph Leonard advertised in newspapers across south Louisiana that he’d bought a steamboat “for the express purpose of freighting cattle from Butte la Rose in the Attakapas to the Park on Bayou Plaquemine.”
The boat was called “Alone,” which anyone who has spent time with a herd of cattle enclosed in a small space probably thinks is entirely appropriate.
People without a herd to move left it alone.
Its aroma was surely not what comes to mind when we think of the stately steamboats of yesteryear.
But, stinky or not, the boat probably did good business.
Drovers from across southwest Louisiana needed to get their cattle to market in New Orleans and it was hard and expensive to drive them through the swamps, marshes, and floating terrain east of the Atchafalaya.         
The Alone carried grown cattle, horses, and mules for $2 a head, calves and yearlings for $1, and a passenger and horse for $5, and it was worth the money.
The (Franklin) Planter’s Banner said in 1850 that more than 80,000 head of cattle were driven each year through south Louisiana swamplands to New Orleans, and that may have been conservative.
Some historians estimate that as many as 2 million beeves made the trek between about 1800 and the arrival of the railroad in 1880. 
A good many of those cattle began their trek in east Texas.
When Charles Taylor Cade (son of the founder of the St. Martin Parish community) made the annual drive from his ranch at High Island, Texas, to Iberville Parish in 1879, 23,000 head of cattle were ferried across the Neches River in a single day — and that was just one man’s herd and one day’s count.
Most of those cattle, which had lived off only what they could graze on the range, were half-wild longhorns that weren’t too fat when they began the trip and lost weight for every mile they walked.
The Banner said that meant a loss of as much as $5 per head in 1850, which would be the equivalent of more than $200 today. Shipping them by rail or boat would more than pay for itself.
That was the calculation that caused Joseph Leonard to buy his cow boat and to run it on a route that was probably already known to cattlemen.
Butte la Rose was one of the westernmost points where cattle could be loaded onto steamboats traveling up the Atchafalaya and through Bayou Plaquemine to the Mississippi, and historian Lyle Williams suggested in an article in 1970 that “the picturesque community” in St. Martin Parish was a stop for paddle-wheelers carrying both cows and people on the Teche and Courtableau well before Leonards’s venture.
“The inhabitants of the northwestern part of the Attakapas could use the Atchafalaya near Butte la Rose as a loading station for cattle destined for the New Orleans market,” Williams wrote. “The old township maps in St. Martinville Court House show opposite Butte la Rose and a little further upstream the location of a boat landing which is at the end of a cattle drovers’ trail leading to the river and branching west to the boat landing and east to an enclosed area labelled ‘cow pen.’”
The Park, near the town of Plaquemine, offered one of several steamboat landings near the junction of Bayou Plaquemine and the Mississippi.
Herds could be driven down the river from there or loaded onto bigger steamers to be hauled to landings in Jefferson City (present-day Uptown New Orleans) and Lafayette City (now the Irish Channel), where the aptly named Bull’s Head Tavern catered to cattlemen.
According to a 1919 article by James A. Renshaw in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly, “The foot of St. Mary Street [in Lafayette City] was given the name of the Bulls Head, for this was the cattle landing. … Slaughter houses were plentiful near the river front; for then every butcher had the privilege of slaughtering on his own premises and the butchers generally resided in the front section of town.
"The cattle were driven through the streets, and by no means infrequently many an exciting chase enlivened the scene when some obstreperous steer dashed away, followed by galloping horses and shouting riders.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.