Bradshaw
Nicholas (Nic) Broussard was 76 years old when he left the courthouse square in Abbeville on April 18, 1934, riding in a buggy pulled by his little gray horse named Susie. He was heading for Washington, D.C., where he planned to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Nic had with him two roosters and a case of Jax beer. He intended to give the beer and one of the roosters to Roosevelt. The other rooster was for Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner. The rooster was the symbol of the Democratic Party in those days, and Nic was a proud Democrat.
He got to Washington just in time for Independence Day, on July 3, after traveling 1,700 miles in 75 days. That was a month later than he expected. He’d told his friends in his home town of Erath that he expected to travel about seven hours a day and make the trip in 45 days.
His plans included stops in other south Louisiana towns – Lafayette, St. Martinville, New Iberia, Jeanerette, Franklin, New Orleans, and others, before heading more-or-less directly to Washington. His buggy was named “the Spirit of Louisiana” after Charles Lindbergh’s famous plane, “the Spirit of St. Louis,” even though Nic thought his buggy ride was a bigger adventure.
“I want you to understand that Lindbergh’s trip was nothing in comparison to this trip,” he wrote in a long letter to his brother Elias. He said Lindbergh had tested his plane and knew that he could make the flight. “But … I started with this little horse and did not know even that it could reach New Orleans.”
Bradshaw
Besides the roosters and the beer, his buggy carried a collapsible wire fence to corral Susie, food for the horse and chickens and for himself, and his own luggage.
His trip was delayed from the outset when he was stranded for a day in Lafayette by a storm but spent a few days visiting a cousin in New Orleans during the first week of May. He was greeted there by the mayor and interviewed on a New Orleans radio station. He told listeners, including a few who could tune in from Vermilion Parish, that he was having a good time.
Nic sent the letter to Elias from Opelika, Alabama, on May 28, recounting that he was delayed two days at the Louisiana-Mississippi line because of a quarantine, probably against tick-borne animal diseases.
“I had to dip my horse and then put it in a truck, [that] carried me about three miles inside the line of Mississippi,” he wrote. The buggy was tied behind the truck, which traveled faster than buggy-speed. “I had to holler at the driver, ‘go slow, go slow,’ and was surely glad when he put me down,” Nic wrote.
He reached Biloxi on May 10, telling a reporter for the Daily Herald that he planned to travel along the Gulf Coast, “then over the Alleghenies and the Blue Grass country to the historic Potomac.”
He’d had another quarantine delay when he crossed into Alabama but wrote that he was making good progress.
“Sometimes I had to get out of the buggy and lead the horse, but I can say he is doing fine,” Nic said in his letter. “Sometimes I have to stop a day or two on account of his feet. If I had not done this, he could not stand the pavements. … Another hard matter is to take care of those two roosters – to put them in a safe place at night.
“The people everywhere … have been very kind to me. … Everybody … [in] big cars and small cars, waves to me as far as they see me. Many times they have stopped me on the road to take my picture – very often some fine girls holding my arms. You know this makes me smile.”
There were a few more problems once Susie pulled Nic into Washington. The first was that park police stood between the horse and the lush grass at Potomac Park. He finally found a livery stable where the weary horse would finally get a good rest.
The bigger problem was that neither Roosevelt nor Garner were in town. They’d left for an extended Independence Day holiday two days before Nic got to town.
He was naturally disappointed but left the roosters at the White House in the care of Roosevelt’s secretary. Then he sold his horse and buggy to the Circle 1 Riding Club in Washington and took the train back to Louisiana.
It’s not clear whether either Roosevelt or Vance ever saw the roosters. I suspect there was no chicken yard for them at the White House and they probably went right to the cook.
There is also no record of what happened to the case of Jax, and I have some suspicions about that, too.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
