Anyone who has seen an old Western movie knows that every cattle drive was accompanied by a chuck wagon driven by a crusty old cook who fixed the beans and coffee and dared anyone to criticize him. Those wagons also accompanied long overland drives when south Louisiana cattle were herded to market in New Orleans, but some of our drives were a little bit different. They used chuck boats instead of chuck wagons.
Cattle were running wild on the prairies well before the first European settlers arrived. The Attakapas and other Indians built herds on the prairies early on and the first European settlers bought cattle from the Comanches and other western tribes. So cowboys were regularly driving herds from south Louisiana to market in New Orleans even before their Western brethren made famous by the movies began herding cattle.
Most of the nearly wild cattle raised here originally came from Mexican stock and took care of themselves on an open range that provided everything they needed. The native grasses offered good nutrition, there was just enough water in just enough places, our climate allowed the cattle to stay on the range all year long without too much stress, and there weren’t many predators. A stock raiser could just turn out a herd and forget about it.
Bradshaw
Bradshaw
Those prairie cattle were nothing like the ones we see growing fat in our pastures today. E.E. Rapley wrote a book about southwest Louisiana agriculture in 1884 and described them as having “enormously long and wide-spreading horns, narrow chests, high flanks, [and] deeply sunken backbones.” Another authority, Edward Knapp, bluntly said they were “all horn and hide with no meat.”
Skinny cows seemed to be of no concern to the early cattlemen. Animals that took care of themselves cost nothing to raise. They had meat enough to feed a family and anything they brought if they were sold was pure profit.
Until shortly after the Civil War most cattlemen grazed their scraggy stock on relatively dry prairie land all year long. Then, sometime in the 1870s, someone realized that the marshes in Vermilion and Cameron parishes provided good pasturage. Rapley said it was as good as any in the world, where “strong, nutritious grass grows in abundance, resembling very much in taste and appearance what is known in the Middle States as red top, only a little taller and as thick as it can stand.”
After that, usually about the end of August when upland grass was getting parched, many cattlemen began to drive their cattle south for the winter.
Aladin Vincent, a greatgreat- uncle of mine, was one of the largest stockmen in Calcasieu Parish in the 1880s. He reportedly drove a large herd along the Calcasieu River to pasturage just north of the Cameron Parish line near Mud Lake each year and left the cattle there until the spring. Regional historian Donald Millett found that the area around White Lake in Vermilion Parish was also a favored spot.
“Driving cattle south from the summer range to the comparatively low, boggy, salt marshes involved a somewhat different operation from the usually dry, hard uplands,” Millett wrote. “Cowhands sloshed by day through knee-deep mud and slept at night in the marsh with its myriad mosquitoes and other insects.
“At appointed places along the lake or river bank, a small vessel — the chuck wagon of the coastal country — met the herd. Manned by one or two men, each being both sailor and cook, these vessels sometimes served as sleeping quarters for the cowhands. After a herd had safely reached the marshlands, saddles and cowhands were loaded aboard the vessel for a twoto- three-day trip home.”
He doesn’t say what happened to the horses. Presumably, some poor soul had to trudge through the marsh and mosquitoes to lead them back to dry land.
About the only good parts of a marsh drive were that the Cajun cowboys didn’t have to cover their faces with bandanas to block dust stirred up by the herd and, of course, that a chuck boat probably served a good gumbo instead of beans boiled over a camp fire.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
