Bradshaw
It took Southern Pacific a little while to catch on to the idea of recruiting settlers to live alongside its tracks across the Louisiana prairies, but the company did it with a vengeance once it started. One of its agents, Sylvester L. Cary, was almost certainly the most aggressive promoter of prairie settlement and is credited with bringing more than ten thousand men, women, and children to southwest Louisiana in the late 1800s.
He compiled a promotional booklet, “Southwest Louisiana on the Line of the Southern Pacific Company” (Poole Brothers Publishers, Chicago, 1893), to boost his claim that there was no better place to live and farm, and included reports from “the most knowledgeable experts “ alongside his own essays, Most of them described the many things that could be easily and profitably grown here, but some included testimonies acclaiming this as a place “where you can have most of life’s blessings with the least expenditure of labor … and where most of the necessities and comforts of life can be produced on the spot.”
The rice industry was just beginning to flourish, and Cary predicted with “no hesitation” that “Southwestern Louisiana, with her improved machinery, her generous soil, wonderful climate … easy conditions, [and] splendid people … will [always] grow rice at a good round profit.”
He said large orchards, particularly of orange trees, were plentiful and profitable, that dewberries, blackberries, and strawberries were “very successful,” and that “the mayhaw, growing wild and in abundance, rivals the guava for jelly,” He described the fig, “queen of fruits,” as “the most prolific and valuable of all,” and wrote about groves of walnuts, pecans, and almonds in what he called this “eminently tree bearing country.”
One essayist said even townsfolk could keep a large truck garden filled with whatever vegetables they liked, especially if wives pitched in with the planting and picking. Another suggested that the prairies were perfect to grow tobacco. A St. Landry planter who grew a bit of just about everything mentioned in the brochure wrote, “If I should tell you of the marvelous crops I grow here, you would think it more like a fairy story than a reality.”
That was exactly what Cary preached, and he had another big selling point to lure his former neighbors from the North. “Pinching cold, chattering teeth, [and] frost-bitten limbs awake neither intelligence, enterprise, thankfulness or genius in a man,” he argued. “Give me a gentle clime, [and] a generous soil laden with moisture and sparkling dew.”
To illustrate the point, his little book includes a letter written by W.J. Randolph one winter day to a friend still living in the frigid North. The writer moved from the Dakotas to the Millersburg community on Bayou Nezpiqué and couldn’t help comparing the winters in the two places.
“I have [yet to see] the first Northern settler [in southwest Louisiana] … who wants to spend the winter in Michigan,” he wrote, “When I read of 30 degrees below zero … I shudder and wonder if I really was ever there. We have had a few frosts [but] the grass is green and cattle and horses on the range are fat and sleek. I am writing in a room without fire and doors open, “Here, if we can’t buy shoes … we go barefoot and never think of freezing,” he claimed. “[I think] I will hitch up and take a buggy ride, just for fun, and think of you poor fellows up there, pressing your nose against the window glass wondering when the storm will let up. … Here we can laugh at the storm … and luxuriate on [our] sweet potato, rice, poultry, eggs, sugar and syrup, corn bread [and] beef … all of home production.”
Cary thought the gentle climate also made for gentler people. He wrote that in Jennings, “you can shake hands with people from every state north of Mason and Dixon’s line. … [They] are more … social since breathing Southern air. … They seem to be on better terms with God and themselves since landing in this gentle clime,” he said.
I’ll buy into practically all of the booklet’s claims. We can and do grow just about anything we want. We probably can spend nearly as many winter days in shorts and T-shirts as bundled against the cold. It is the good place to live that Cary proclaimed it to be, and I’ll even agree that most of us seem to be on relatively good terms with God and ourselves.
It’s the bit about bare feet that bothers me. I don’t think I’d be quite as cavalier as W. J. Reynold about going shoeless even on the balmiest winter day. I hope he wrote that tongue-in-cheek and that if he actually took his touted buggy ride both he and his sleek horse were fully shod.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
