Jim Bradshaw: The other story about Mowata's name

A few weeks ago, I reported the oft-told story that the Mowata community in Acadia Parish got its name because nobody could find a board long enough to print the original name of Morewater.

I have long suspected that the story was suspect, but had never heard anything to contradict it. Erich and Kathryn Loewer have heard another version, and it seems a lot more likely.

They say the area was known as Mowata long before the railroad even thought about crossing the Acadia prairie and that it was named for a band of Mowata Indians that had been forced out of Alabama, maybe at the same time as the Coushatta, probably later.

The Coushatta (known as Koasati in their native language) came here after the Treaty of 1763 ended the war between France and England that, among other things, had been the excuse for the Acadian exile.

Under that treaty, the French, who first settled in 1699 in the Mobile area, gave England all of its territory east of the Mississippi River, except for New Orleans.

As a result, French families such as Fontenot, LaGrange, Brignac, Bonin, and others decided to move across the Mississippi into French Louisiana. The Coushattas had been friendly with the French, and they were also pressured to move from the territory now held by England.

In 1797, the influential Coushatta chief Stilapihkachatta (Red Shoes), led 400 followers across the river, and another 450 Coushattas joined them in the spring of 1804.

Over the next several decades, the Coushattas moved their villages from place to place near the Red, Sabine, and Trinity rivers, until, finally, in the 1880s, they used homestead laws to establish a community at Bayou Blue in Allen Parish, three miles north of Elton.

It’s not perfectly clear how or when the Mowata band became associated with them, apparently briefly and in small numbers. The Mowata are not mentioned by Fred B. Kniffen, who did voluminous research on the historic Indian tribes of Louisiana.

They were apparently a small band allied with the Choctaws who hid in the woods in Alabama to avoid removal with other tribes to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in the 1800s.

They may have come here after the Civil War. According to one history, they “remained in the forest until the mid-1880s, when northern timber companies moved into the area to exploit Alabama’s abundant pine forests. Discovering that Indian families lived there, lumber company officials enlisted the aid of L. W. McRae, a state senator … [who] knew the people were Choctaws, but he wanted to bring industry to the region and use them as a source of cheap labor. To facilitate the acquisition of land, he suggested calling them ‘Cajuns,’ believing that the Choctaws looked like the descendants of French-speaking Louisiana Acadians. Given this new ‘Cajun’ identity, the Indian population was included in the U.S. Census, made to pay taxes.”

There doesn’t seem to have been any connection between the Mowatas and the real Cajuns, but, according to the Loewers, a small band called Mowata seems to have been established in the area of the old Jones plantation (the area around the present Mowata community) by the time Erich Loewer’s family emigrated to the area in the early 1900s.

“My family (Loewer and Bieber) migrated from Germany in 1905. Some of us still own land that was originally part of the Jones Farm,” he writes.

“Several years ago, we were visiting with some elderly neighbors, Rae and Bruce Faulk. She told us how her grandfather on occasion had to ride his horse through the area inhabited by the Mowata Indian Tribe. He was fearful and tried to look straight ahead, not too much to the left or the right. Rae was a Reed, and if I recall right, her grandfather was also a Reed.”

Kathryn Loewer writes, “I can add a bit more detail from the conversation with Mrs. Rae. The Mowata Indians were eventually relocated to the Coushatta Reservation but they did not exactly get along with them — some drama over an Indian princess. …. I do believe the train did stop there for water, but the area was known as Mowata before the railroad came.”

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