Jim Bradshaw: The search for and romance of the sentinel oak

I have become intrigued by the story of an oak tree that stood at the mouth of the Calcasieu River centuries ago.

I came across a reference to it in an essay about an expedition led by the Spanish pilot and cartographer Jose de Evia in 1785. This was the first thorough exploration of the southwest Louisiana coastline on record, and his journal entries are among the earliest good descriptions we have of the south Louisiana coast.

According to one history, “his descriptions of the landmarks and beaches conform remarkably to the present. One can easily visualize the sandy, treeless beaches running westward from the mouth of the Mermentau, and the live oak groves beyond the beach stretching along the Front and Grand Chenier ridges.

“His landmark for entering the Calcasieu was a large oak located almost directly on the eastern tip of its mouth. … To enter the river, pilots should steer from a point about one mile south of the ‘sentinel oak’ directly toward the west tip of its mouth. This ensured reaching the deepest part of the channel running across the bar.”

This lonely, probably gnarled and wind-bent, tree stood by itself, well west of the oak groves on the Cameron Parish chenieres, and that’s part of what intrigues me.

I wonder if it was the last survivor of what once had been an oak grove, how long it had been standing there, and just how big it was.

It didn’t necessarily have to be that big to be seen from a mile or more offshore, since it was standing by itself in the flat terrain at the river’s mouth.

Not many ships would have used that sentinel in 1785; southwest Louisiana was still sparsely populated. Martin LeBleu and his wife, Dela Marion, the first recorded Europeans to settle on Lake Charles, had arrived only four years earlier, in 1781. Only a handful of families had joined them by 1785. Donald Millet, regarded as one of the best chroniclers of southwest Louisiana history, said commerce on the Calcasieu was “negligible” until almost a century later, when schooners began to haul lumber from Calcasieu sawmills.

Legend has it that a few pirate ships used the river before then, but we don’t have a clue that Lafitte, or any other corsair, steered by a sentinel oak at the river’s mouth, and we have virtually no history of any other boats using the river for decades after the Navia exploration.

I find no reference to the tree in any of the accounts of attempts which began in earnest in the 1870s to dredge the sand bar at the river mouth so that heavily laden schooners could get through. (That was a real problem until the opening of the Lake Charles ship channel in the 1920s. The Lake Charles Commercial reported in 1864, for example, “For the last six weeks our schooners have had a hard old time of it at Calcasieu Pass. As many as eighteen schooners have been aground, in the ditch, at one time. Some of the larger ones remaining as long as fifteen days.”)

There is also no account of the tree when the first lighthouse was built in 1876 at almost precisely the placed where Navia’s tree apparently stood. If it was not long gone by 1940, when the lighthouse was torn down to make way for an enlarged ship channel, it would almost surely have been a victim of progress then.

(The nearby lighthouse at Sabine Pass still stands. It was first lit in 1856 and deactivated in 1952.)

It could be that nobody other than our erstwhile explorer ever thought of the tree as a sentinel, or used it as one.

We need to remember that his observations were written in Spanish and probably tucked away in the Cabildo in New Orleans, or in some similar place in Havana. How many schooner captains who went to or from the Calcasieu would have even seen the instructions? Or read Spanish? Or any other language?

It could also have been that the next hurricane after Navia wrote his  instructions swamped the old tree, well before there was enough river traffic to need a sentinel of any sort.

Still, the romantic part of me wants to believe that the weathered old oak continued to stand for years, and that schooner captains anxiously scanned the shoreline through their spyglasses for the ancient marker that showed the way to safe harbor.

It just seems to me to be the kind of thing they would look for when pilots steered their ships to this part of Louisiana.

It probably never happened. But it could have, and I’m going to keep hoping that it did.

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