Jim Bradshaw: Lazy census-takers or mean fishermen?

Either census takers were too lazy to count them, or south Louisiana fishermen were too mean to be counted. Those were the conflicting claims after the 1890 census of Cameron and other parishes on the Gulf turned out to be wildly wrong.
A special agent of the census bureau with the unlikely name of R. M. Gopehevitch was sent to South Louisiana from San Francisco to try to sort things out when the numbers caused “great indignation” in coastal Louisiana.
He got the job partly because he was fluent in French, which the first census takers seemed not to be.
The Lake Charles Commercial reported in March 1891 that he’d spent “twenty-five days on a lugger in the bayous and lakes on the coast of Louisiana from the Mississippi river to the Texas line,” trying to get to the bottom of things, and that he’d discovered “very serious errors” in the counts.
  “For instance, in the parish of Calcasieu, the names of 160 persons were sent in as fishermen, but the closest search revealed only sixteen engaged in that occupation,” the newspaper said.
“In Cameron over 100 names were sent in, notwithstanding there are less than thirty men engaged in the work.”
The Commercial claimed that the census data for Calcasieu listed as fishermen “leading professional men, merchants, and parish officials, but not the name of a single man who really earns his livelihood by fishing.”
Gopehevitch told the press he suspected that the original census takers “made up their returns in a barroom without having looked into the matter at all.”
 The agents claimed otherwise, of course.
They reported to the bureau in Washington “that their work had been done with great effort and not a little danger, for the fishermen were a suspicious and a lawless set of men.”
That claim, Gopehevitch said, “is not true and does very worthy people great injustice.”
He said the fishermen were “honest and hardworking people who could make a great deal more money at any other business if they devoted the same energy and as much intelligence to it as they do fishing.”
The Commercial asked in an editorial for the census-takers to explain “why so many gentlemen who know nothing and care less about the fisherman’s trade should have been enumerated and classified as fishermen.”
  The newspaper also wanted to know why the census takers “pronounced the fishermen of this section such a dangerous set of people,” and “why is it that there is such an error in such a simple piece of work?”
The editor wrote, “We have been revolving this peculiar fishermen’s matter in our mind and we are no nearer a solution now than when we first discovered it, hence we are compelled to call upon our local census takers to rise and explain.” A search through later editions of the newspaper gives no clue of what the census counters rose and said, if they did rise and speak at all.
Whatever the answer, the hoopla seemed to bother Mr. Gopehevitch and the newspapers a lot more than it did the fishermen — who probably never even heard about the ruckus, or, if they did, had other things to worry about.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.