Jim Bradshaw: What happened to the Nunez fortune?

By JIM BRADSHAW
The Nunez community on La. 14 just east of Kaplan is named for descendants of a Spanish soldier who retired in Louisiana and did quite well for himself.
His grandson was rich enough to help refill an empty state treasury when the state nearly went bankrupt, and supposedly left a sizable estate when he died.
Nobody knows for sure just how sizable because a big hunk of money was never accounted for.
José (Joseph) Nunez was born in Galicia, Spain, in 1761, so was just 18 years old when he came to Louisiana in 1779.
He was discharged from the army about 1800 and began to raise cattle on the south Louisiana prairies.
His marriage to Marie Rose Richard was recorded in St. Martinville in 1802, and his cattle brand was registered there in 1804.
The couple made their home at or near Perry, where Marie died in 1833.
 There’s no record of when José died. He testified in a court case in 1838, so it was after that, and it was probably before 1850, because he is not listed in that year’s census.
Most of his estate went to Joseph Nunez Jr., who was popularly known as Joe Gallag, a nickname that came from a Spanish word for thrift, and that turned out to be entirely appropriate.
When he died in 1883, some obituaries called him the richest man in Vermilion Parish.
Joe Gallag’s son Adrien followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather as a planter, rancher, and politician who served several terms in the state legislature.
He lived near the community that now carries the family name, but was then known as Spring Hill,
Some time after the Civil War, he moved to a place near Bancker that was later known as Live Oak Plantation. He continued to juggle careers as a planter, stockman and politician.
The biographer William Henry Perrin said in 1891 that Adrien was “remarkably successful.” 
He owned 14,000 acres of “excellent land, bounded on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, and on the west by Vermilion Bayou.”
Most of the land was used to graze stock, but 300 acres were “in a high state of cultivation, the principal products being rice, corn and cane.”
He also dealt “extensively” in a “fine grade of stock …[including] a number of Durham cattle, and a superior grade of horses, sheep, and hogs.”
Adrien had retired from politics by 1874, when Paulin Fontelieu, the incumbent state legislator, was killed in a duel.
His neighbors asked Nunez to get back into politics and he easily won the election to replace Fontelieu.
He made his uncommon contribution in 1877.
According to a newspaper article written many years later, “When [Reconstruction rule] ended, the State Treasury was depleted and there were no funds to hold a session of the Legislature . . . [so] Mr. Adrien Nunez . . . came home and got the sum of $25,000 . . . and that money kept the State Legislature in session.”
Adrien’s health was failing when he sold the Live Oak Plantation in 1904 for what would be close to a million dollars today. He died a year later, but when his affairs were settled a good part of the money from the plantation’s sale seems to have vanished.
Nobody’s sure where it went.
One theory is that Adrien was “land rich and money poor“ (like many others after the Civil War) when he died. He’d suffered some financial setbacks and the most probable scenario is that the money from the plantation sale went to satisfy old debts.
But there were also rumors that one of Adrien’s sons and much of Adrien’s money disappeared at the same time. Rumor mongers said the son went to Mexico with the money. His mother and siblings thought he went in the opposite direction because there was no money.
When Mrs. Nunez, the former Lillian Breaux, died in April 1935, her obituary in the Abbeville Meridional said that “nothing is positively known” about one of her sons, Cybile Nunez, “a promising young man who left Vermilion years ago to regain the lost fortunes of the family … but the family fears he was one of those adventurers who lost his life in the rush to the gold fields of the Klondike.”
He would not have been the only one from south Louisiana who were part of the Klondike Gold Rush, a stampede of prospectors who dreamed of finding a fortune after gold was discovered near Canada’s Klondike River  in 1896, nor the only one wo was lost in that stampede.
Even if Cybile was a victim of the Canadian wilds that seems a happier story than that he ran off with the family fortune.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.