Groceries and Tokens

So, they abandoned life on the water for a land-based existence, these families that made up the Myette Point community. The transition came with gains and losses. One of the losses was the convenience of having all your supplies brought to you by the fishboats, so that one of the immediate needs that had to be met was finding a place to purchase provisions such as groceries, staples, fishing equipment, etc. – all of the things the fishboats had previously made available. The nearest source for this that they found was the plantation company stores and one privately owned store of a similar nature. There were two sugar plantations that were somewhat near to Myette Point - Oaklawn and Bellevue. Each of these had a company store that could provide the basic needs of the families, and the other one was a private establishment owned and operated by Medric Martin since 1935 and continuing today. Early on, the Martin store, known to all local people as “Medric’s”, became the primary location for the needs of the new community at Myette Point. It was about three miles away by dirt and gravel road, while the Bellevue store was about five miles from Myette Point. Interestingly, the Oaklawn plantation store was closer but does not seem to have cultivated business from the new community. They went, instead, to Medric’s. Mr. Medric is 95 years old as this is written, and he has many memories of the early days of Myette Point and its people. He speaks favorably of them with respect to their ability to function in a frontier environment, and of their honesty in commercial dealings. In the first few years he would deliver groceries to the levee when the road was dry, and he often hunted ducks with them.

“They came there [to Myette Point], and I met em. I used to go huntin…I started meeting em. They needed groceries and things, so, they came in. They had no way…they had to walk in and walk out, so I…. And uh, that’s how I start meetin em. Those were mighty good people, those days they fished and things and plenty times they didn’t have any money, and I advanced em. Oh yeah. I advanced em. People what needed something, I let em have it. And…and, all of em paid me. [. . .]” [Medric Martin, 1996]


As always in any fishing activity, not all fish were considered prime saleable items. The familiar catfish and buffalo were almost always marketable, but not so garfish and choupique (bowfin). Boys who caught such fish saw opportunity in a public not averse to eating them. This population was primarily the black workers of the plantation population. Whenever a garfish or choupique was caught, the boys would walk the two and a half miles to the plantation and sell their fish to enthusiastic buyers there. However, there was a catch to these sales that provides an opportunity to mention a part of the plantation economy not often discussed today. It is the token system.

On some plantations, such as Oaklawn, there was a double method of payment used. The more familiar one would be the one where cash was paid to employees at an agreed upon rate for work done. This was paid monthly. The other method used tokens. It seems that if an employee ran out of cash between pay periods, they could appeal to the plantation on a day called “order day” for an advance on the next pay day. This advance would be made to them in the form of tokens, metallic coin-like pieces that had monetary value assigned by the plantation. The tokens could only be used at the company store. Enter the Myette Point boys. When they sold their garfish and choupiques to the plantation workers, they often received tokens as payment, which in turn could only be used to buy things at the company store. They did accept this form of payment for their fish, not having much option. Edward Couvilleir and Bootsie Millet talk about this.

EC: I remember…I remember when we used to catch a gar, a choupique or somethin me and Bootsie took [off] and head to the front with that sucker to sell it.

BM: Aw yeah. [laughs]

EC: Yeah lord! They had a oak tree about…almost middle ways along the trail [in the fields] goin to the lake, and that’s where you stop and rest, under that oak tree.

BM: Umhm.

EC: Big old tree, man! There wasn’t no such thing as ridin…walk to the front, over here. And they had them tokens out here, that’s what they’d pay us for the fish with, tokens. [. . .] That’s what they had at Oaklawn.

BM: Oaklawn Store, that’s all they would handle…them, uh…

EC: Tokens. They had a triangle hole in the middle of em. Yeah. You had to buy from Oaklawn Store with that.

The token image is from the Exonumia website.

The river is at 13.2 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, rising just a little in the next few days. The Mississippi and Ohio will encourage falling stages on the Atchafalaya after that. The river shrimp are starting their migration 30 miles south of here. They should be here in two or three weeks. Fun to see at night.

Rise and Shine, Jim

Basin Education

Most of us assume that the word “education” means reading, writing and arithmetic, and in the restricted sense that would be true. In this restricted sense, these are learned skills that would be taught by paid teachers in some sort of dedicated building. But, of course, in so many ways the true education received by people in general includes much, much more than that. A definition of education in this more general sense might emphasize the need to learn those skills necessary to provide food, clothing and shelter for oneself. Perhaps the need for social skills might be added to this.

The Myette Point families had ample education in the general sense. They learned to convert energy into food and shelter at an early age. They learned the social skills needed to thrive in close living conditions. They learned how to apply established techniques to the problems of everyday life, and to discard those that were not workable – always substituting some variation that might work better. Government agencies have only recently learned this useful process; they call it adaptive management, as though it was a new thing.

If food, clothing and shelter are the primary criteria for life, and skills for achieving those things are available from mentors all around you, then the other skills are simply not essential. During a certain period of time, then, reading, writing and arithmetic were not necessary to living a successful life in the Basin, and the absence of schools for teaching these things was not a serious issue or a disadvantage.

However, even in the Basin some of the Myette Point families had opportunities to learn in the schoolroom. There were two of these schools; the first one in the central Basin on the island known as Hog Island and the other, later one, on the levee after the Myette Point community had been formed. Both of these were the results of efforts by Baptist missionaries to bring religion and learning to Basin inhabitants.

The most memorable religious influence, at least to people who lived there, began with the building of the Little Brown Church. This floating building was used all up and down the middle Atchafalaya region for Baptist missionary work. There were two of these. The first was dismantled and used to build the Hog Island school. Margaret Couvillier Neal was a student at the school.

“When we first started out there, it was the Little Brown Church on the water. And we’d go to church on that. And after that they got it moved on the bank and made us a schoolhouse out of it.” [Margaret Neal, 2005]


The teachers at these Baptist missionary schools were often members of the missionary community. Sometimes they were the wives of the missionary men.

“Now, the teachers at Keelboat Pass was, uh, Ophi Mae Price…and uh…well first off, started out at Hog Island Pass…[. . .] …the last one there was a Mrs. Miller, she was the last teacher. She stayed in that…like, one side had a school room and the other side was like an apartment, and she stayed in the apartment and taught one through the eighth grade. In one room, yeah. And so you…you learned quite a bit.” [Robert Vuillemont, 2006]

It should be mentioned that, prior to the Baptist activity, there was Catholic missionary work in the Basin also, in the person of a Father R.J. Gobeil. With his own boats, he moved himself around the Basin, ministering to the houseboat communities where he found them. Even though there was education offered, it tended toward progressing in stages through the Catholic religion, and there is no mention of interest in starting schools where secular learning could be had. On the other hand, the Baptist missionaries tended to promote schools within the larger framework of general education.

“Well, Keelboat and Hog Island, they had a lot of people on em. But you see, the Catholic had been out there for years, but they never…they never started no schools. When Brother Marks came out there, well, immediately he saw the need to put kids in school.” [Edward Couvillier, 1997]

Increasing pressure from government policies regarding compulsory education was one of the reasons why the Myette Point families decided to leave the Basin and the houseboats they had lived on for generations. Most people migrated to towns and could take advantage of school facilities existing there. The Myette Point families did their best to comply with the required school experience and still continue to live and function in close harmony with the Atchafalaya. They moved to Myette Point and then started sending their children to Franklin schools. This did not work due to the difficulty of getting the kids to a bus, about three miles over dirt/mud roads. After leaving the water permanently, all of them by 1950 or so, the requirement to send the children to school and the difficulties this still presented, attracted more effort from Ira Marks, the Baptist missionary who had been responsible for setting up the school and missionary church at Hog Island more than a decade earlier. The primary difficulty was in getting the school-age children living on the levee to a place where a school bus could pick them up. In the early years, this meant someone driving them to “the front” over questionably passable dirt/mud roads the distance of about three miles. In rainy/muddy weather, they had to walk. Noting this difficulty, and in collaboration with the Baptists, the community built a school on the skirt of the levee that functioned for three years. The school was finally closed when a road was shelled (the building continued to function as a church), improving it to the point where a school bus could reach the levee and transport the children. The children born after about 1945, then, were all schooled first in Franklin, then at Myette Point until the road was improved, and then most of them finished in Franklin.

So, education, formal education, has that kind of history in the four generations of people who make up the Myette Point community. Literacy was spread widely in people born around the Basin in the 1850s, it was not prevalent in those born from 1880 to 1940, and then it was again prominent. It is interesting that literacy, when not necessary to day-to-day life, can be so easily discontinued. Having been a factor in the first generation, it was not encouraged within the second and third generations, and then was reestablished as a functional tool by the fourth generation. Today, children born to the fourth generation are themselves teachers, lawyers, accountants, religious leaders, and many other professions that take formal education for granted.

The black and white pictures are from the collection of Darlene Soule and from Artie Buck.

The river is at 16.7 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, falling slowly to 15.0 feet by the 17th. Nothing in the Ohio or Mississippi wants to extend the high water this year. Looks like we have had what we are going to get.

Rise and Shine, Jim

The Levee

Since this story is about the Atchafalaya Basin and the people who inhabited it, there can be only one levee to speak about – the one that fundamentally changed the Basin and the way the people related to it. It was built in the 1930s as a result of the flood of 1927, the latter having taken place at a time when the Mississippi floods could cause national rather than only local distress, and at a time when the federal government was ready to do something to prevent similar floods in the future, if possible. The new national outcry to “do something” was met with the Flood Protection Act, enabling the federal government to apply planning and funds toward effective flood prevention for the first time. It was this Act that mandated the levees in the Basin, changing it forever. Where there had previously been only a huge natural overflow basin for the Atchafalaya River, there was now a somewhat lesser basin with hundreds of miles of manmade levee totally defining the flowage hydrology in the swamp, and restricting it to the will of man, so far.

There are, of course, two levees around the Basin, the East and West Protection Levees. But using the term “levee” in singular form is desirable here. It is always referred to in singular in the interviews with the Myette Point families because the concept of what the levees meant is an overriding and all-inclusive idea. Consequently, “the levee” means more than a ridge of dirt extended for many miles. It means in aggregate all the adjustments that had to be made and all the environmental changes that took place. It was at one time a barrier to travel and a provider of a new means of travel. It brought an opportunity for changing lifestyles. It made life on land possible and life on the water harder. It gave life and it took life. “The levee” did these things, and more.

When it was built, did this new thing, this long dike, cause the Basin residents to rise up and create petitions, or march on someplace, or start campaigns citing potential environmental degradation? No, it did not. The people most affected by the levee were not activists in a broad sense; that kind of aggressive response is mostly for those who can view effects from outside a situation. The Basin people were on the inside in the strictest sense. They were the ones who were so intertwined with the environment that they were almost part of it, and so had to adjust to the changes around them, or succumb to them. Most people made the adjustment, for as long as the changes were not lethal to life, they could be absorbed. Old ways disappeared and new ways emerged.

The presence of the levee to the Myette Point families is so significant that their existence in the Basin can really be divided into the before and after levee construction. So, before the levee, what was the Basin like? It was a vast, open, unrestricted piece of semi-aquatic environment mostly unattractive to human beings. It had many characteristics that made it uncomfortable to people. It had mosquitoes, and snakes, and water and mud – all of which civilization tends to eliminate over time, if it can, by spraying the mosquitoes, killing the snakes, draining the water and drying up the mud, and so making living easier for some fraction of the human population. But for a long time the Basin defied attempts at those modifications, simply because it was so big. Modification was only possible on a grand scale, but the Basin met its match in that the building of the levee was just such a large-scale modification. In cutting through drainages, the levee restricted one of the Basin’s primary inherent features, its watercourses. Subsequent realignment and dredging applied to these watercourses was enough to initiate changes that would redefine the Basin environment forever.


People who lived in the Basin had different responses to the flood of 1927. If they lived on land, the water inundated their houses (to a depth of 12 feet on Hog Island, a previously thought to be safe place). It drowned their chickens, cows and other livestock. Gardens and fruit trees were killed by the flooding that lasted for many weeks. If people lived on houseboats, however, the obvious merits of rising with the water are apparent. The older generation (Blaise Sauce) of Myette Point people was already on houseboats and some of the succeeding generation too. These people tied their boats along upper Bayou Lafourche along with other houseboats. When the water receded, many people returned to the land they had relinquished to the high water and rebuilt their lives there. Others moved their houseboats back into the Basin. To these Basin residents, the political response to the 1927 flooding was not very apparent during the next few years, but the big changes had been put in place and the new resolve to prevent future catastrophes was effective in putting the money and people together. The levee was going to be built, and there would be big changes in the flow of water in the Basin.

The higher volumes of water every year, and the restricted flow in the deeper Basin channels, created swifter currents and more dangerous whirlpools. The small boats used by the people were not meant for these hazardous conditions, push skiffs being particularly susceptible to whirlpools, or eddies as they were sometimes called. Putt Couvillier had memories of someone who was still trying to fish in 1941 or 1942 with a push skiff. He notes how dangerous fishing in the strong currents generated subsequent to the building of the levee could be.

“ And used to have some great big old eddies, you know? Six foot deep, up to six and eight foot deep. Some worse, you had to watch em, you know? And he used to…they used to not have no boats [with motors] out here. And uh, used to have an old fella livin out there on that island [Goat Island] you know? So he’d go out there and run lines, you know, cold, cold, cold…ice sickles. [. . .] And uh, he used to fish out there in skiffs all the time. He didn’t have no such thing as boats [with motors], you know? And he set off down the bayou in that skiff and sometime he would get in one of them eddies, and he have to push about five minutes to get out of there, you know? Keep turnin, turnin, keep pushin, keep pushin! And boy, look, sometime that old back of that boat, you know, it would catch the back like that…sometime it would catch a lil water, and sometime it won’t….until that skiff cover that…in other words, it would hit it just right [and] it would cover that eddy, and kind of smother that eddy out a lil bit. And boy, he’ll take off! They had eddies that big, that current was so bad here. That’s how big them eddies was. [Putt Couvillier, 1974]



Just as was the case in the timber industry, work offered by the levee project was eagerly accepted by the Basin people. They were already good at the things needed to build the levee – the expertise with tools and machinery was highly valued. And truly, by engaging in these actions, the families helped shape the future of their own landscape. They helped build the conditions for the end of the Basin as they had known it for generations, and they built their own bridge to a future on land and all that that entailed.

It was a bridge in that it was the transition to living on land. Because that is so, it is important here to realize that the newly built levee was now functioning as a gathering place for people trying to leave, and in some ways trying to remain close and not to leave, the Basin. Eventually 15 houseboats would congregate in Myon’s Canal, live there for a few years, gradually getting used to the new conditions, and finally moving over the levee.

So, there was a before and after phase to the placement of the levee in the Atchafalaya Basin, with the construction of the levee as the central defining point. Before the levee there was unfettered access to anywhere in the Basin that there was water to take you. After, there was restricted access, the restrictions dictated by the levee itself. Before the levee there was an open Grand Lake, miles across and miles long. After the levee there were narrow bayous and land where before there had been only water. Before the levee there were people living their whole lives in the Basin. After the levee there were no longer people living in the Basin.

But the levee was a generous home to the Myette Point families for 25 years, beginning in about 1950 and ending abruptly in 1975. During that time, four generations of the families lived there. The last generation was the only one that did not experience houseboats as a way of life.

It was generous, and then, in a way the levee evicted them. The 1972 high water threatened to overtop it, which in turn caused the Corps of Engineers to have to do levee repair at Myette Point. The people were living along the levee such that they were in the way of the repairs, with no legal right to be there, and the Corps required them to move. As a group, most of them moved to a location on Bayou Teche, but that’s another story.

The picture of moving is from Edward Couvillier and the two black and white ones are from the Darlene Soule collection.



The River is at 18.6 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, heading down to 17 feet in the next five days. The Ohio and Mississippi are not sustaining any more high water at this time. Time to think about getting crawfish traps out of shallow swamps. Too bad, but it is June, after all.

Rise and Shine, Jim

Beginning Life

Like people everywhere, the people of the Myette Point families were born, lived their lives, and died - that’s all. But perhaps there is a difference in that they did it while living on water most of the time and this provided some circumstances that people who lived on land did not have to deal with. Things like modes of travel and the distances between institutions like doctors and churches come to mind, and the isolation and smallness of the floating communities themselves was a factor too.

As in most other parts of this story, the span of time covered (about 100 years) dictates that circumstances changed over that long period. Opportunities came and went, technologies came and died out or were improved, and people adapted to the changes as necessary. The practical issue of safely giving birth was one of the things that changed over time, or perhaps it is better to say that the means of assistance at a birthing event changed.

There is a consensus among those interviewed that assistance at birth was always sought. From the earliest times people recognized that giving birth was a time filled with both great hope and at least moderate anxiety. Even though the great majority of births took place with no unforeseen negative consequences, there was enough potential for serious complications that the presence of someone with prior training was always engaged for the event. This person was the midwife of frequent mention in stories of the old days. Curiously, even though a medical doctor might have been within reach in Morgan City, he was not the first person to be called to assist at a birth. It was the midwife. From the early 1900s to the 1950s, and even beyond, people who lived on the water towed their houseboats and pregnant wives to Morgan City, a distance of about 15 miles. They tied up in a large excavated area adjacent to the Atchafalaya River called The Pit and a midwife was contacted to assist at the birth. The midwife would sometimes come to live with the family until the baby came. This process of towing to Morgan City continued for a long time, with some families having nine children born with this process, accounting for at least 18 years of continuous practice. Dot Bailey Couvillier, born in 1938, relates how and where her birth was brought about.


DC: Well, they had…just before I was born, they had moved to Morgan City from across the lake [at Blaise's Canal], you see? To wait, for my arrival. Yeah. And after I was born, they moved back. You see?

JD: Did they tow the houseboat down to Morgan City?

DC: Oh yeah. Towed everything.

JD: Now, what’s the reason why your momma would’ve wanted, you think, to move to Morgan City for you to be born? I mean, not all your brothers and sisters weren’t born in…in hospitals?

DC: No, most of em was born at home but they always towed…you know, towed to Morgan City. In case they need a doctor.

JD: So, oh, I see, all right…all right…all right. So they towed to Morgan City in case the doctor would be needed. But who delivered the children anyway, if the doctor wasn’t needed?

DC: Midwife.

JD: A midwife…black, white, old, young?

DC: No it was a white [woman]. I forgot what Momma used to call her, but uh, they’d go get her ahead of time, you know? She’d actually live with em until it was all over with.


The midwife’s name was Ms. Florence Duval. And Dot’s mother Agnes Sauce Bailey, was born in the same place under similar circumstances, but 26 years earlier. And her husband, Myon, adopted the practice from his father-in-law, towing his houseboat to Morgan City for his own children to be born. Dot, in the above quote, was one of his children.

Many of these midwives were older members of the Myette Point families, especially those who had taken up residence in Morgan City. It would seem that there was a large number of them, but maybe not. Midwives kept books on the births they administered, presumably for later recording in parish archives. One such document is in the possession of the Anslem family in Morgan City.


After 1950 the Myette Point families were mostly living on land, having hauled their houseboats up and over the levee to form a land-based community. This location was near enough to the town of Franklin for medical assistance to be within reach if called for. It came in the form of doctors who would come out to the families for a birth, or the families could come in to town and engage a doctor to help there. Joe Sauce was born in 1949 and he was delivered by a Dr. Horton who would come out to Myette Point to help when asked. Lena Mae Couvillier was one of the women who left Myette Point and went to nearby town of Franklin when birth was imminent. Sometimes the process didn’t quite turn out to be as smooth as it could be because the doctor mishandled the situation. She says this about the 1960 birth of her youngest son, Kevin:

LC: Kevin’s born…he come out, Dr. [. . .] dropped him in the garbage can. And I heard him. I say “You dropped my baby!”. “Ah no, no”. And he wouldn’t admit that for years and years and years. And not too long before he died, Kevin had got a kissing disease, or something, whatever…Yeah, I had to bring him to the doctor. “Ah” he say “Is that the one I dropped in the garbage can?” I say “You trash!” [laughs] I say “I knew you had dropped that baby”. [laughs] [Lena Mae Couvillier, 2005]


There were all the usual pregnancy-associated anomalies that you encounter in other populations. There were miscarriages and premature births, and stillborn babies too. Dot Couvillier, who carries the dark skin of her European Spanish blood, was one of the premature ones.

“ And the story they tell about Dot concerns why she’s so dark, in color. They say that she was born prematurely on a houseboat in the Atchafalaya Basin, and she was so small that she wasn’t able to keep her body temperature up, so what they did was they lit a fire in the wood stove…and in those days of course the wood stoves were the big ones they used to bake bread with, and everything else. So they wrapped her in towels, and put her inside the oven of the wood stove, and kept the oven warm to keep her warm. And they did this, apparently, for several weeks. And we always laughed that the reason she’d so dark is because they overcooked her…in the oven.” [Jim Delahoussaye, 1992]


Some examples of the size of some of the families would go like this. The family that Blaise Sauce was from had 14 children, Edward Couvillier had ten siblings and his sister Margaret had 11 children, Liza Henry had nine siblings. Edward sums it up with:

“All them people had a lot of kids, didn’t have no television.” [Edward Couvillier, 2007]

The pictures with people in them are courtesy of the Darlene Soule collection.

The river is at 18.8 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, falling very slowly over the next several days. And then it should fall pretty rapidly because there isn’t any water pushing down from the Ohio and Mississippi. Both are falling. Make your living while you can, boys.

Rise and Shine, Jim

A Night in the Life

There is one big piece of the linefishing story that has not been brought out in the material previously presented. It is the practice of fishing the lines at night. It is a different experience and there is a different color to it. A night in the life of a linefisherman could go like this. First, it needn’t be a man. Many times the boats were “manned” by women. Sometimes the women would be with their husbands but in a separate boat, sometimes the woman would be out in the lake alone among the other boats out that night. Either way, they did the work like the men did. The boats in use were almost always 14-foot cypress bateaux with 20 or 25-horsepower motors. Most of the time the people fished five nights a week, Monday through Friday.

Beginning the cycle. Time to get up – about 3:00 pm. Eat Breakfast. Go outside and do whatever maintenance was necessary as a result of last night’s fishing. Make sure the battery to be used for the headlight is charged and extra bulbs are on the boat. Remember how to change a bulb at night when the light you need to do it is in your hand with a burned out bulb. Practice.

Hook the boat up to the truck at 4:30 pm. Drive five minutes to the Myette Point levee landing, get some ice in a small ice chest, and launch the boat. Start the motor and head out into the swamps around Grand Lake.

The night of work begins about 5:00 pm, although there is still three hours of light left in the day in midsummer. The three hours is devoted to getting enough bait to fish for the following seven or eight hours of darkness. Most of the bait obtained in the late afternoon is caught with a castnet. Certain places are known to have concentrations of shad, both large and small ones. Other places could be searched for mullet. Both of these cut baits are considered to be “hard” baits and can be relied on to stay on a hook longer than shrimp will. Getting 2000 or more shad, or pieces of larger shad and/or mullet, usually takes the full three hours prior to darkness. Shrimp bushes, if the fisherman has some set out, are not productive until after dark. If the cut bait runs out, the shrimp bushes can be run for additional bait.

Throwing a castnet for three hours is a lot of work in the late afternoon heat. Most of the commonly used nets are five feet long, giving them a ten foot spread when opened on the water in a good cast. Not all casts were perfect. Some nets used were seven footers. It took a good man to throw that net with good opening consistency. The big breakthrough in castnet ease of use came with the invention of monofilament, earlier ones all being nylon or, even earlier, cotton. This light, clear line made castnets easier to throw, primarily because they were so much lighter for their length when wet. Wet monofilament isn’t much heavier than dry, but the other filaments are a lot heavier wet.

So now it’s getting close to sundown, about 8:00 pm. Time to sit down, take off the bib overall rainsuit pants that were worn to repel some of the water from the castnet, change the dripping shirt, and eat the evening meal - usually sandwiches and/or leftovers of some meal based on rice and gravy and meat. Watching the sunset and eating good food is not a bad way to end/begin a day. Today the boat is tied to a tree overhanging the river on the right bank. The sun is setting directly over the river way, way up ahead. There is something the size of a seagull flying toward you directly ahead, coming down the river on your side, right at the water’s surface. It is a black skimmer, with its oversized lower beak cutting the water in a furrow as it flies along. Being partially hidden behind branches, it doesn’t see you and flies within three feet of the boat, zipping past. The most memorable thing is the sound that the bill cutting the water makes as it goes past. It goes sssssSSSSSsssss, and gone. What a wonder that was! But the sound of mosquitoes soon follows the bird and on goes the repellant.

Time to get to work. It is dark now, and you turn on your headlight. It is connected by long wires to a 12-volt battery in the back of the boat. Unlike earlier fishermen who did this before batteries were invented, you just switch the light on. Sixty years ago you would have been using a carbide light and the light from a small acetylene flame would have been your companion all night. But the light tonight is brighter than that, and right away there is a fluttering around your head, increasing as an annoying group of insects is attracted to the light. These are mayflies and you will have to contend with them most of the night. It is not bad unless the one-inch long, yellow insects get behind your glasses and flutter there making seeing difficult. Even though they cannot hurt you, this behavior has been known to drive some people to vacate Grand Lake at night for good.

There are three crosslines set to run this evening. Each has about 350 hooks on it. It is midsummer and the water is dead low, allowing all three to be set in the deep water of the channel – from 40 to 80 feet deep. At no other time of year could this be done. Most of the larger fish are in the channel right now, and fewest of the smallest ones. All of this is going on in the open part of Grand Lake between Goat Island in the north to Cypress Island in the south. Other people have lines in the channel and because of this your lines have to be separated so that no one feels crowded. From the top line to the bottom one (downstream) is about five miles. It is best to run the lower line first, working upcurrent to the upper one. When first reached, the lower line has a few fish left on it from last night. Some bait does survive to fish during the early daylight – pieces of mullet particularly. These fish are removed and fresh bait applied to the whole line, and so on up the river to the end of the upper line. To be able to see floating “drift”, running in the main channel of the Atchafalaya River is always done without a light. Most of the boats on the river are powered by 25 horsepower engines and these are run about half speed in the river at night so that it is possible to “see” and avoid something floating before you hit it, usually. It takes about three hours to run and bait the 1000 or so hooks, provided there are no hang-ups to take your time. Ice the fish.

It is now about midnight, and time for lunch. One of the reasons the lines were run upstream is that now the boat can be allowed to drift free down the channel while lunch is eaten and the scenery enjoyed. Lying on your back at midnight in a small boat in the middle of the Atchafalaya Basin, drifting down the river makes a lot of lifetime memories, and there is scenery. The stars are all they can be in Louisiana on a clear night, not Arizona, but nice. And you look up long enough and for the first time perceive that there is 3-dimensionality to the sky – a clear depth that you never noticed before. And all the sounds are all being made for you, it seems. The owls from the far off forests and the bullfrogs too seem to be facing you as they speak.

Because the river is a shared experience, after all, other fishermen are finished with their first run and see you and run over to you to pass some time. They tie their boats to yours, making a raft of five or six boats just floating along at midnight. Out comes the coffee and the cigarettes and the sharing of the night’s experiences. Seeming tall tales are borne out by visible evidence of fish caught. Laughter spreads out on the river. It is a very good time to be alive with friends. There is talk about how the docks, the middlemen in this business, are taking advantage of the fishermen. How all the money is made by those who do the least work – but they own the facilities to process and ship and that makes them commanders in the fishing story. Talk starts about calling the fishermen together from all over the Basin and getting them to unite and build their own dock, eliminating the middleman altogether. Can it be done? Sure, some say. Never, others say, fishermen are too independent to unite. It takes many nights to plan this, but it is a beginning.

It is about 1:00 am now, and time to start the second run – actually the first one of the night on a full baiting. A little more coffee and goodbyes and start the run down to the end of the lines downriver. It’s not so far now, having drifted part of it. Notice that there is a rumble to the west, more or less in front of you, and a dim lightning glow in the clouds down low in the sky. It is best to anticipate the direction of the thunderstorm’s drift if you can because getting caught out here is not a good thing. It will be an hour or so before the situation could be a problem, and it might not ever be but best to be watchful. On the second run, you catch a good number of fish as you progress up the channel toward the upper line. Nice fish, as they often are in the channel, mostly blue cats. But when you get to the upper line and start running it from the left side you can tell there is a problem. The line is much tighter than it should be, indicating that it is not coming up from the bottom as it should. It is hung. Either the line slipped under a stump on the bottom or a large fish has wrapped it around something. Either way, it isn’t coming up, and fixing it would mean the end of fishing tonight, so you drop the line and go to the other – the right – side and pick up the line there. It is tight here too, but you can run about 100 hooks before it gets too tight (too dangerous) to run. Maybe there is 100 pounds of fish in the wellbox of the boat now, not bad. Ice them and head back downriver for the first line. The thunderstorm has been forgotten but did not come this way.

4:00 am. Start the last run for tonight. Bait is getting short so you will have to get some more before finishing this last run. OK. No help for it, go for the shrimp bushes. This last run extends into daylight. Baiting the hooks and running the line has become so routine that it is a surprise when you realize you don’t have to have a headlight to see the hooks as you come to them. Switch the light off and continue the run. By 5:30 the birds are beginning to fly over the lake, mostly night herons going to roost somewhere to the east in the big swamp. They make that low whistling sound that so often signaled “get the shotgun” in past years. Around 7:00 am the last hook that can be baited is done and you see people coming up the channel and others coming down from upstream, all headed for the mouth of the little canal at Myette Point called Myon’s Canal. Most of them are those you had coffee with during the night. You ice the fish and prepare to make the twenty minute run to the landing too.

After loading the boat onto the trailer, around 7:30 am you reach the place, by truck, where Myon Bailey lives. He will buy your fish after weighing them. You have about 200 pounds for the night’s work. Not too bad. Most are catfish, but there is an extra 30 pounds or so of gaspergou. Myon won’t buy those. You will have to sell them in the quarters of Oaklawn Plantation if you want to take the time. You go into Myon’s house (a houseboat on land) and sit in his kitchen with several other fishermen who fished all night too, some of them drifted the channel with you. All drink coffee and tell stories about the night and Basin life. A tape recorder on that table would record wonderful things. Myon puts $50 in your hand, that’s 25 cents/pound for your catfish – the going rate in 1975.

Home about 8:30 am and eat supper. Sleep by 9:00 am, and then up again at 3:00 pm for another night of running lines.


The river is at 18.0 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, rising to 18.6 feet in a few days. There is not a lot of rise up above on the Mississippi and Ohio so not much more rise than that is expected at this time. Should be plenty of water for the crawfishermen to use. It is lapping over our deck surface. Something of an inconvenience, that’s all.


Rise and Shine, Jim

Timber Work

The Myette Point families lived in a period of constantly increasing lumbering activity
in the Basin. It was always a part of everyday life, whether the individuals were actually working in the industry or just aware of it somewhere in the surrounding area. From the earliest members represented on the taped interviews (who were born around 1860), to the members of the fourth generation (born about 1930), there was always something to do relating to the forests of cypress in the Basin. The people witnessed the emerging technology for harvesting and processing cypress timber and each change in the technology made for more and more efficient removal of the trees. In keeping with this, there were lumber mills all around the Basin. From Plaquemine to Morgan City there were always places ready to convert timber to lumber.

Timber harvest in the Basin was an activity that utilized the skills the people already had – they were proficient with boats, knowledgeable about living in the swamp, and had considerable experience with the use of tools like axes and saws. All of this made them effective employees.
There is testimony that people who eventually settled Myette Point worked in timber from at least 1884 to 1943. Myon Bailey says this about his stepfather (Homer Daigle, born in 1882), who worked mostly on the machinery used to pull the logs out of the swamp much of his life.

“Oh yeah. …that old man, he worked a long time there. He worked hard, that old man. But he didn’t make much money. I mean, uh, him and her had to be careful, what they do. …..had a big family.” [Myon Bailey, 1989]


But the timber industry represented a seasonal, not a constant, livelihood to the families about whom this material is written, at least in the years prior to 1880. Trees could be felled, but then they could not be gathered and removed from the forest until high water came in the spring of the year. People who remember this older method of harvesting refer to the activity as “floating timber”.

There were two innovations that changed this reliance on high water to float logs – the skidder and the pullboat – both used cables and winches to pull logs out of the swamp over dry land. These two innovations, together with the use of railroads where possible, introduced both the beginning of the greatest harvest of cypress in the Basin, and the end of it. From the original introduction of the year-round harvesting, to the beginning of the end of the old-growth forests, was only 44 years – from 1883 to 1927, with a peak in about 1900. The industry continued to cut timber, but according to sources the harvesters coming across the Basin from the east met those coming across from the west in 1927, neither knowing the other was drawing near. When they met, most of the virgin forest had been cut. Work continued into the 1940s, but gradually dwindled to non-profitability.

Whether you “floated” timber or used machinery to extract logs, the harvest relied upon a technique for bringing the trees down and removing them that had been in use for over a hundred years - that of ringing the trees to kill them and then waiting some length of time (from several months to a year) before cutting them down. The purpose of this was to make the trees buoyant enough to float by allowing the sap to decrease. A live cypress, full of sap, will sink, and most of those that sank were lost forever. Ida Daigle was part of the cycle of killing the trees and then cutting them down later.

ID: Floatin timber. Deadin…not floatin em…but deadin em. [. . .] That’s for all the sap to go down to when you throw em, they’ll float.

JD: Now, how did they…how did they do that?

ID: They’d go all the way around the tree, and chop.

JD: Cut around the tree?

ID: Yeah, cut around the tree. Then when the water would come up, and then they’d knock em down, see, and they’d float like biscuits on the water.


Once the trees were killed and felled, the logs could be brought out to a place where they could be gathered into floating “booms” and conveyed by steamboat to a lumber mill. To make these booms the logs were aligned side-by-side to some width and then linked with a device called a chain dog. Edward Couvillier and his wife Lena Mae describe how the booms were constructed. It was this step in the process that could either deliver logs safely to a mill or allow them to break up and scatter, some sinking forever.

JD: What’s a chain dog?

LC: That’s…they put in them logs to hold them together. [laughs at my ignorance]

JD: What’d it look like?

EC: You have a boom of timber, you know?

JD: A boom of timber is just a raft of timber?

EC: You cut you a willow pole, maybe 30 feet, and go clean across the boom of timber. Well, a chain dog, you had a chain, a regular chain…Just a regular link, about a inch, two inches. And the dog, to drive into the log…it was about a inch and a half wide, about 3/8 of an inch thick. [two six-inch iron pins connected by about 16 inches of chain]: Made of iron. About six inches long. It was pointed on the end. They had a hole in it, your chain went into that dog. And you drive it on this side, and you cross over that willow tree, and you drive it on the other side.

JD: Why did you cross over the willow tree?

EC: That what it takes to hold the log, you see? Like if you have one right here, it’d be just like you had a clamp, would go across, tighten it down. Now, if your chain dog was too long for your pole, you just wrap it. You just turn it till it get tight enough so when you drove it down, and you had about that much of the head of the chain dog stickin out, well, it would be tight. And that’s how you held them logs. Every log, when you go across that boom, and every log was chain dogged. Some of em, you’d put two. Some of em maybe three chain dogs on one log, if it was a big log. And you had an old ax, to knock em out? And you’d want to knock em out just like you was gonna chop that wood. You hit that chain dog…[the ax blade cuts into the iron]

JD: With the blade of the ax?

EC: With the blade of the ax. [that’s why it was an OLD ax] And that’s the way you’d knock em out the log. Now, the big pullboats, what they had…they didn’t use a ax, they had a…a…like a crowbar, with a fork in it. And just like you’d run up there and catch that chain dog…catch the chain where that chain come around, and they had a hook here, and you could just…

JD: You could lift it up. So it had a foot on the crowbar, you talking about?

EC: But it was a heavy thing, and just didn’t pack that around. We didn’t pack it around, we just use a ax. I seen us take a brand new one, buy a brand new ax, just to have a dog ax. Just to knock them chain dogs out. It’d be dull as all hell, man.


The mills were almost all situated on a waterbody so that the booms of timber could be received at the mill site. As circumstances would have it, not all the logs boomed together were equally floatable, and the heavier ones were supported on either side by timber that floated higher. When something happened, heavy weather or accident, causing the boom of timber to break up, the previously supported logs would sink – giving us the modern term “sinker cypress”. These are the logs that are sought after today. When they are raised, some after being in the water over 100 years, the lumber is as though the immersion had never happened.



Another very important relationship with the cypress industry was that it supplied, although inadvertently, a source of much of the building material used by early houseboat dwellers. This was in the form of what the fishermen called pieux (pronounced “pew”), meaning “pickets” in French. It had long been known that one of the many attractions to using cypress as a building material was that it would split for long lengths in a predictable manner. These pieux came about when it was discovered that some of the cast-off pieces of cypress trees could be split this way to yield high quality boards for building anything from fish boxes to whole houses.

The wood was available because the lumber company would fell trees that sometimes had a hollow base. If the upper part of the tree could be salvaged, the hollow bottom ten or 20 feet might be cut off and discarded. The remaining cylindrical material could be four or eight feet in diameter, but with only the outside ten to 12 inches being solid wood. These cylinders could be sectioned with a saw and then split down the grain to yield boards as long as was desired and ½ to one inch thick, and eight to ten inches wide. The boards were rough but could be smoothed with a draw knife if desired.

So, in summary, then, there are a few things to wrap up in this piece of text about the relationship between the Myette Point families and the timber industry. First, the logging industry was always around them. There was not a time between 1850 and 1943 when there was not some form of logging going on in the Basin near enough to the families for them to be aware of it. Second, employment by the companies was valued, much as the emerging industry, oil, was to be. Third, fishing and the related activities was always there as a fallback. People took advantage of the money available in timber work, but they always returned to harvesting from the water when they needed to, and the culture they developed and practiced was always shaped by water.


The picture of the pieux fence is courtesy of the Darlene Soule collection.

The River is at 16.3 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, a healthy rise, growing to 17.1 feet in the next four days. The Ohio and Mississippi are both falling way up above so this rise will stall for at least a little while.

Rise and Shine, Jim

Basin Steamboats

In an age that many who read this cannot remember, there were steamboats in the Atchafalaya Basin. The smoke pouring from the smokestacks could be seen from long distances down Grand Lake, signaling yet another load of cypress logs being towed to a place where conversion to usable lumber was a final destination.

“Booms” was what they were called, these long rafts of cypress logs. Their transmutation from living tree to building material is part of another story, but the steamboat is the vehicle first associated with that journey. Since the logging industry offered employment to people who knew how to function in the swamp environment, those people knew and were familiar with steamboats as the “heavy haulers” of the Basin. People cut the trees, “floated timber” out of the swamp to bayous, and then formed up the logs into the booms. The booms were hooked up to the rear of steamboats and the boats pulled the rafts to a sawmill located on the edge of the Basin. Myon Bailey and his son-in-law Edward Couvillier were eye witnesses to the time when employment by the logging operations was very appreciated. However, it is worthwhile to remember that all the people interviewed here were fishermen first and last.

MB: When I first was livin at Williams Canal across there, them steamboat, Albert Anslem [Hanson?], them lumber company, big steamboats, goin cut timber across there. All the way down. Albert Anslem [steamboat] parked many times in the end of that canal where I was livin.

EC: I remember when that sucker [boat] used to go up to Catfish [bayou], hook on to that timber, and that steamboat would pass, then you could just see that timber goin for miles.

MB: Miles and miles. Oh yeah.

JD: Really? Those floats, those rafts would be that big?

EC: Miles and miles of that stuff.

That was how it was done. But the memories of the Myette Point families can be even more personal than that. They do remember steamboats for the work they offered, if indirectly, but also for the times the boats brought presents in the form of sweet things to eat or holiday presents for the children along the bayous. You also sense a feeling of wonder in their voices as they talk about the giant boats (on a relative scale) and the power they exhibited in doing the work they did. Neg Sauce was born in 1924 and was there for the last of the steamboat/logging operation. As fishermen, they sometimes got pieces of iron from the boats for trotline weights, and they could watch in rough weather to see the big log booms break up, many logs sinking never to be recovered.

NS: Yeah, a kid, I was a kid. I was little. Sometime we’d get some from them, you know? They had to have them big old boilers settin on the steamboat, to run the steamboat with. Steam engine.

JD: Umhm. So they had to have wood that they would throw in the boiler to boil…

NS: Yeah. They’d use wood. And they’d pile up wood on that boat. Throw a big old piece of wood in there, and they ready to take off, boy! That’s some powerful boats, them… yeah! Oh yeah! Pull seven, eight booms of logs like nothin.

JD: Is that right? They would pull em, too, they wouldn’t push em, eh?

NS: Uhuh. They’d pull em.

JD: Those booms never did get away from those boats sometimes?

NS: Oh yeah! They lost a lot of em. Big, bad weather would come up, you know, like we still get. And get so rough, it would break em up. Yeah, a lot of em was lost like that.

The memories belong to the early years of the Myette Point interviews. Those who remember the steamboats best were born before 1950, when the last boat to affect the families was seen. The recollections of Myon Bailey who was born in 1905 and worked in support of the steamboats are perhaps the richest. Myon was one of those who cut the trees and processed them for the booms. He speaks here with his son-in-law Putt Couvillier.

PC: But goin back to the olden days, what’s the name of that steamboat? That was the Albert Hanson, and the Captain, uh…

MB: Captain Clifton.

PC: Captain Clifton. And uh, Oscar Lange, what’s the one Oscar Lange had?

MB: He had uh, let’s see…

PC: Edmond Hughes, I believe, Edmond Hughes, or something like that. They had three steamboats. They had the Captain Clifton, the Albert Hanson and the other one…

MB: Suwanee. The Suwanee. Williams boat. The Suwanee, yeah, that was Williams, S.B. Williams boat. Yah. That’s the fastest steamboat they had around.

PC: We used to eat biscuits…they’d pull up in the channel there…

MB: That…that was the Captain Clifton …[or, remembering better] that was the Albert Hanson, they call it. The boat.


And he adds that he was stranded once, not quite a stowaway.


“Right out here in the lake. They’d get timber by the big old booms, you see. They were steamboats…the Albert Hanson, Cap’n…uh, I think it’s the Cap’t Ace. But uh, he used to come down with large tows of timber out of that lake…pass way out back of the island [Goat Island] out there, all that was lake. And go on down with his timber. And when he come back up, we used to live along there in them campboats, and they’d blow their horn. And they’d tie up in the Cut, there, and give us all some biscuits and treats, you know, something to eat. And then they’d blow the horn and we’d get off the boat, and they’d take off and go on up. Comin up light, you see, they’d pass through that Cut, there. [. . . ] We’d go on that boat, but one time they pushed off with me on there. They had to come back to the bank and let me off. You know, they blowed the whistle, had to get off. ” [Putt Couvillier, 1974]


Edward Couvillier, born in 1928 toward the end of the timber operations, was still able to work “floating timber” and then booming up the logs. And Putt Couvillier and his wife Dot, both born in 1938, were, as children, in on the final phase of steamboats in the Basin.

JD: Now, is that…at that time, was that the only big traffic there was on the rivers, was those steamboats?

PC: Well, you didn’t see too many tugboats or nothing. Most…mostly steamboats.

JD: Ok, when was the last time you can remember steamboats makin any use of that, uh, that water at all? When…?

PC: Well, that’s been many a year ago, I mean. That’s right after I was…I was just old enough to walk and get around and follow the gang, you see? When they used to pass. I was born in ’38, so that wasn’t… I believe early ‘40s. Somewhere around there, I wasn’t very old.

These timber-industry steamboats were not the truly giant floating palaces that moved commerce up and down the big rivers. Those giants carried people and tremendous volumes of goods on their decks. Most of the Basin stern-wheeled boats were much smaller than that because they had to be able to negotiate the twists and turns of the swamp bayous pulling the very long, multiple-segmented booms. And because the places they went were usually shallow, the boats were designed to work in shallow water. The Carrie B. Schwing shown here was first built as a larger boat that was probably confined to the larger bayous and lakes in the Basin. After the original burned down, the second version was shorter and could probably maneuver in smaller waterways. Information on these two boats is taken from a self-published (2006) book by James Hymel, entitled “A Human Interest Look at the Carrie B.” The model by Billy Pontiff is also of one of the shorter boats.

The period when steamboats traveled the Basin coincided with the existence of the big cypress forests. There was some employment for them in the newly emerging oil industry but the busy season was over, so to speak. When the cypress was finally logged out in the late 1930s, the steamboats began to appear less and less, so that in a few years there would be only a reduced number for the young Putt Couvillier to remember. As though to prolong a sense lingering usefulness, the final page in the story of some of the steamboats was written in a way that commemorates their structural features rather than their nautical functions. Some ended as fishdocks in Calumet.

PC: Yep. Oscar Lange bought one of em for a fish dock.

JD: Is that what Oscar Lange’s building is? An old riverboat?

PC: Old uh, old uh, steamboat. Used to haul timber.

Others were finally rested in places like New Iberia and served as floating casinos or dancehalls. The one there was called the Showboat. Still others had their top decks removed and rebuilt as residences in the Basin, such as was done to house Myrtle Burns Bigler and her husband Harold, along the Atchafalaya River.

With the close of the timber industry and the beginning of diesel engines as a preferred propulsion system, and the deepening of channels in the Basin, the steamboats faded away. They are commemorated today only in pictures, some housed in the archives of the timber industry and others in museums etc.

The River is at 14.3 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, rising to 16.3 by May 12 five days hence. At good rise. The Mississippi and Ohio are supporting significantly more water. We’ll see.

Rise and Shine, Jim