Jim Bradshaw: Boats of all sorts broke our isolation

=Even today some scholarly articles claim, mistakenly, that south Louisiana communities, i.e. anything west of the Atchafalaya and particularly Acadian communities, were isolated backwaters with little connection to the outside world until the railroad brought civilization to them in the late 1800s. That is just flat-out wrong.
Geographer Lawrence Estaville Jr. was one of the first to declare unreservedly that “the notion that the Cajuns were geographically isolated” until nearly the 1900s “is a myth.”
He said in a 1987 treatise that the misconception began with articles written by four “experts” who did not understand our language or culture (or want to) and formed their views in brief visits here. (“Changeless Cajuns,” Louisiana History, Spring 1987).
He looked at 28 articles and found that 23 of them drew directly from those four “authorities” and another four were indirectly influenced by them. Thus “a fraternity of researchers” repeated “over and over” the errors of the earlier studies “evidently … [with] little inclination to question their validity.”
Estaville’s studies showed that our network of waterways and the many boats that used them supported more commerce and communication than outsiders could grasp, especially if they based their ideas on a short visit and a preconception of what they would find here.
We used pirogues, flatboats, keelboats and other craft to travel within the region and to get to New Orleans markets well before regular steamboat service between the city and Bayou Teche began in 1819.
The paddle-wheelers were on other south Louisiana streams not long after that, and a good many of the steamers that worked the Teche met sailing ships that linked us to faraway places.
Most of these ships stopped at Berwick Bay, but some could travel up the bayou at least as far as Franklin. The Planter’s Banner, published there, regularly ran notices advertising that “a new schooner load” had replenished the stock at one store or another.
“In the winter the bay presents a perfect panorama,” a letter to the Banner said in 1849.  “Numerous steamers, brigs, and barks, with other smaller craft, are seen coming up the harbor under full sail; vessels are visible, too, along the bay and rivers, at plantations, discharging or receiving freight.”
That hardly sounds like isolation.
“Schooners … sailed up the Lafourche, Teche, Vermilion, Mermentau, and Calcasieu to engage in lucrative … commerce,” Estaville wrote. “The ubiquitous steamboat skimmed into the most remote locations within the South Louisiana water web. …
"Tons of agricultural commodities were shipped to market from the ‘Louisiana’s garden’ along Bayou Teche; customized steamboats hauled three to four hundred head of prairie cattle at a time to New Orleans auction lots; and huge rafts of cypress logs were towed out of the Atchafalaya Swamp.”
Likewise, specialized trading boats regularly made their way from the city to south Louisiana. Estaville named “fish, fruit, and ice boats; restaurant boats, saloon boats, and showboats with musicians, dancers, magicians, gamblers, zoos, and later even silent movies; boats with photographers, doctors, and dentists; and … the store boats packed from stem to stern with groceries, dry goods, hardware, notions, and other merchandise.”
The last of the paddle-wheeled grocery boats, the V.J. Kurzweg, plied Bayou Teche at least as far up as New Iberia into the 1940s.
In December 1940, its agent advertised in The Waterways Journal that the Kurzweg was “leaving as usual, every Tuesday evening [from New Orleans] for Plaquemine and Bayou Teche.”
Well before the Civil War, according to Army Corps of Engineers historian Martin Reuss, “Pattersonville (Patterson), Franklin, New Iberia, St. Martinville, and Vermilionville [Lafayette] possessed the comforts and institutions of a settled life - banks, schools, hotels, churches, distilleries, post offices, and commercial stores.” (Designing the Bayous, Office of History, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1998)
Even communities such as Bayou Chene in the Atchafalaya Basin or Pecan Island in the Vermilion wetlands that were accessible only by boat were visited regularly by mail boats and traders, and residents made periodic treks to “the mainland.”
An article in the Abbeville Meridional said that most people in Pecan Island had at least two boats, a work boat to use in the marsh and a speedy boat that could get to Abbeville in only two hours.
We somehow got to polling places to elect a governor from Lafayette. Alexandre Mouton, in 1843, and Estaville found that after the coming of the railroad in 1880 towns in what he called Cajun Louisiana “grew more rapidly than those of Anglo Louisiana”
He calculated that in 1900, not counting New Orleans, nine of the state’s 14 urban places with more than 2,500 people were in south Louisiana.
Backward? Isolated? Sure.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.