Jim Bradshaw: 'Henry Clay,' 'Jenny Lind' trekked across the prairie

When we cruise across the south Louisiana prairies today, we know almost exactly where we are all the time. Numbered markers are set along the highway at one-mile intervals, so we can calculate how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. It wasn’t always that way. Sometimes the road just kept getting longer and longer.
The first trails across the prairies were probably made by wild cattle foraging for food and water, and were trampled out according to their whim or intuition. Some of these began to be used more-or-less regularly when cattlemen started driving herds to market in New Orleans, but they still wandered pretty much willy-nilly as the drovers looked for the best routes.
There seems to have been something like an established route that ran between ferries crossing the prairie waterways by the 1850s, but the trails were still far from anything that could be called a road — and still seemed to meander according to the travelers’ whims.
That made it hard to figure just how far it was from one place to the other, or sometimes which way to go to get there.
When newspaperman Daniel Dennett crossed the prairie in 1851, for example, he seemed to have a pretty good idea of how far he’d traveled, averaging about 30 miles a day in a light wagon pulled by a horse named Henry Clay (for the famous statesman and orator) and a mule named Jenny Lind (after the singer who was the rage of the day).
But Dennett’s calculations dealt with how far he’d gone, probably based on the pace of his team, not so much how far away a certain destination was. He simply drove each day until he found a place to spend the night, then figured how far he’d gone. When he described his journey in a series of letters, he noted, for example, that he spent one night at the residence of a Mr. Myer, which he thought to be about 25 miles from Vermilionville (Lafayette). He left the Myer place the next morning, heading for the Mermentau, which, he said, was about 12 miles away.
He wrote that “after three hours’ travel over rolling prairies, coolies [sic], and flat wet lands,” he reached Hay’s Ferry, where Mr. Hay led the team across the Mermentau on a log bridge that was 18 inches under water. Dennett then followed a trail called the Indian Crossing through a swampy area, and “passed on towards the Lacassine, through a wet, sloppy prairie, on what was called a road; but like most of these prairie roads, a mere cow path.”
He stayed that night at Welch’s Crossing (Welsh) and had to go a mile out of his way when he tried to cross the Lacassine the next morning, “to avoid a bad crossing … of considerable depth.” Even so, four inches of water flooded his wagon.
He estimated it was 17 miles from the Lacassine to English Bayou, just east of Lake Charles, and several miles more to Lyon’s ferry on the Calcasieu.
In getting to Lyon’s ferry, Dennett wrote, he “took water into our wagon at four crossings, went through ponds … groves of pine timber, much wet prairie and some dry, and travelled thirty miles, that being the distance from Welch’s on the Lacassine to Lyons’s on the Calcasieu.”
Father P.F. Parisot, a missionary from Texas, traveled along trails that were hardly more than footpaths when he visited southwest Louisiana in 1852. He didn’t give distances in his Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary (Johnson Brothers Printing, San Antonio, 1899), but said he spent much of his time “crossing bayous and bottoms, marshes and bogs, sleeping out and getting lost on the pathless prairies” and that his method of crossing deep streams was “to hold my horse by the tail with one hand and paddle with the other.”
Daniel Dennett’s calculations seem remarkably precise for his time and place, but another traveler, Frederick Law Olmstead, was less certain when he crossed the grasslands about the same time, and got more confused the farther he went. He was going in the opposite direction from Dennett, from the Sabine to Opelousas, but that wouldn’t have made much difference. A mile is a mile, no matter which way you drive it.
According to Olmstead’s account, the longer he rode, the farther he had to go — and people he asked for directions were just as confused as he was.
The road was distinctly marked, he said, “but had frequent … forks, which occasioned us much annoyance as clouds of musquitoes [sic] … hovered continually about our horses and our heads.”
“At Lake Charles,” he wrote, “we were informed that the exact distance to Opelousas was ninety-six miles. After riding eight hours, we were told by a respectable gentleman that the distance from his house was one hundred and twenty miles. The next evening the distance was forty miles, and the following evening a gentleman who met us stated that it was ‘a good long way … thirty or forty miles, and damned long ones, too.’”
I think I may have traveled roads like that once or twice, looking for places I never found.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.