Almost Swimming

I just ran across a piece I wrote prior to starting this blog. It was done in 2005 (November 3) as an email; sent to several people on a short list. In order to get it “into the record” so to speak, I would like to post it in Riverlogue.

“Once in a while something happens that is so impressive that you just have to tell someone. Yesterday afternoon late I was down at the river catching some small bream for the cats. I looked up and something was in the water coming toward the near bank. It was about 50 feet out and obviously swimming, but not like the usual otter or beaver or nutria. Binoculars made it out to be an armadillo. Now, folk wisdom has it the they can’t swim, but in fact walk across the bottom of a waterbody if they choose to cross it. Given their current distribution, that would include the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi – very dubious accomplishments. But still, I had never seen one swim, until yesterday. For those of you who have not seen it let me say that they don’t appear to be very good at it. They cut a rather ungraceful swath through the water, kind of a waddling side to side motion ( if you can waddle in the water). Their back never quite submerges, but their head does – it comes up for a breath and then submerges for a couple of feet, and then back up. When it came to the bank it just kept right on going like the whole thing had been a walk on dry land. One wonders what the incentive might be for such an ill-equipped animal to do this. The distance it swam was about 400 feet.”

The river is at 15.5 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, falling slowly for the next few days and then more quickly for the next several weeks. It finally looks like the Ohio and Mississippi have decided to act right for the season and quit setting high water fall records that have not been seen for a long time. Of course, a few big storms in Ohio could change all that.

Rise and Shine,
Jim

High Water Sunrise

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and look to the east and it takes a moment to believe that you are truly awake. It was so on the morning of day before yesterday. You almost think that it cannot be real until you know that it is, and it really looks like that. These pics have not been retouched in any way. The cat, Alcibiades, enjoyed it too.

The river is at 14.2 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, falling a little to about 13.5 feet by the end of next week. We have come to expect low water in the fall and this is very high water for this time of year. How high is it, on a relative basis? Using USGS data, the average level for the month of October for the last 12 years is about 3.8 feet. This October the average is 9.0 feet, so far. Again, according to USGS, the highest water in any October for the past 12 years averaged 4.5 feet. This October we saw the 14.2 mark come and go. What does this mean? Who knows. It is very inconvenient for those of us trying to maintain docking facilities on the river. Because we move things closer to the bank in high water, those things are in danger of being left stranded on the bank when the water begins to fall. If we plan any time away from the river, it is always in the fall during the supposed low water period. Not this fall. Staying home is a necessity for the time being. The high water has more serious consequences for people making a living fishing in the Basin, although there are few of them left compared to the old days. My friend Kevin Couvillier runs lines commercially in Grand Lake near Franklin and he tells me that the swift current has his lines so tight that he can’t run them. He could, but if they break in his hands under severe pressure he could be badly hurt. And he is having trouble finding river shrimp to bait with. To him, this high water out of season is more than inconvenient. And the Ohio and upper Mississippi do not look like they are through with us yet, there is more water filling the channels up there and we might get even higher levels during this unusual fall season.

Rise and Shine, Jim

Soul Skiff

The push skiff has a solid place in the history of transportation on the water. It has a beginning somewhere far back in time, before there were mechanical engines to supplement human energies. It was no doubt the recipient of earlier designs of European or Mediterranean origin, and it arrived on our Atchafalaya Basin doorstep as a sleek, pointed boat with a strangely narrowed stern. A boat that could be propelled through the water with deceptive ease, and so propelled over long distances. It was such an accepted piece of what it was to live and work on the water that a lot of people refused to give it up even after the gasoline engine became popular. Even so, progress was not hard to define if you were pushing the boat along at its slow pace and were passed by one of those newfangled putput bateaux going a sizzling four miles an hour. Progress was not as pretty, or as quiet, but it went faster and you could sit and watch the water go by without pushing your way through it. So, the skiff faded away until there are few left. A small number of men still have the skills and knowledge to make these boats, and you can see them on display (the boats) if you go to the regional fairs and festivals that feature traditional watercraft.

It is even more rare to find one of the original old boats. A few weeks ago we visited a man who lives on highway 182, west of Franklin, St. Mary Parish, Louisiana. His name is Howard Freeman Sr. We went to see him because he was the person who most recently owned and used the old skiff pictured below. It came to him when he bought a camp on Fourmile Bayou in the early 1960s, and this boat came with the camp. He does not know more about its origin than that, which leaves us free to speculate (authority on traditional boats, Dr. Ray Brassieur, speculates that this boat may have been built by Pierre Part craftsmen). Mr. Freeman did use the skiff a lot for fishing around his camp, but over the years it passed from his possession to others, collecting the signs of age and disuse that it now shows, eventually coming to Bobby Hodnett (white shirt) in Baldwin. Bobby hoped to repair the boat but realized that by this time it was beyond salvation. He was on the verge of committing the old hull to the solid waste dump when his friend Edward Couvillier saw it and took an interest. Edward knew that the boat was past redemption, but he also saw the possibility of using it as a model to replicate it in cypress, as originally constructed. The rest of this piece records how that happened. We loaded the boat onto a flatbed trailer and delivered it to Edward’s workshop in Oxford, St. Mary Parish.


Edward is a boatbuilder/fisherman who has had space in this blog before. Several years ago he received an apprenticeship grant from the Folklife Division of the Louisiana Department Culture, Recreation and Tourism to build a cypress bateau and teach two of his sons how to do it. He did that and the boat he built has been featured locally as well as at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

The boat at note here has been variously called a push skiff and a pull skiff. The usual means of locomotion is to stand in it and push forward with a pair of oars loosely mounted on the sides of the boat. Thus it seems more appropriate to use the “push” term. Edward had never built a skiff like this, leaving that to his brother for all the years a push skiff was used in his family. He built bateaux and Abner built skiffs. Abner has been gone for many years and now, Edward thought, at age 80, that he would like to try to do a skiff. He would get a head start by using the old skiff as a model. His son Larry, one of the apprentices of the earlier boat building, decided to make it his project and assumed the responsibility of buying the wood and spearheading the construction. The apprenticeship project is carried forward by this.

Back to our visit with Mr. Freeman. In our conversations with him, he repeatedly used terms to describe the push skiffs in an emotional way. And perhaps the most striking thing he said, the most intuitive thing, was when he described the way the boat must be built. He said “If you build a push skiff, you have to put your soul into it. Yes, your soul”. Not sufficient to just put nails into the wood, it must have part of you too. Some things people say resonate and have a greater than literal meaning. If a college student heard Howard Freeman’s words from the front of the room, they would be underlined.

Edward took the old skiff apart, carefully preserving the wood that was not rotten. He laid the old wood aside to use as a pattern to build the new skiff. Larry in the meantime had located sinker cypress wood from the Anslem brothers in Morgan City. He would buy four boards from them. The boards were 21 inches tall by 18 feet long, and all of the new boat, excepting the ribs and timbers (forming the frame), was made from these four boards.

Over the next several weekends, each piece salvaged from the old boat was used to model the new pieces. Although you could copy the old pieces, you could not know how they were originally made to fit together, and each time things had to be bent to curve in the right way, without splitting, it was an exercise in using the skills the men had obtained from a lifetime of woodwork. The cypress eventually did allow itself to be shaped, and the boat took form. As it did, Larry and Edward, neither emotionally demonstrative men, frequently remarked at how pretty the shape was, and how good the curves looked. I have known them for a very long time, and it was a wonder to see them wonder like that.

This boat looks good because it is simple and curved and smooth, or appears to be simple anyway. The formulas that would describe the curves and lines and lengths of cut would not be so simple to most of us, but to Edward and Larry the fit of the pieces just made sense. The boat is pretty, that is all there is to it. What is left to do is to make the frame for attaching the nine-foot oars to the boat. The frame is called a “joug” or yoke and is elevated above the sides so that the oars rest at waist-level to someone standing in the boat. Larry made a model of this boat and it shows one way of making the joug and the oars that go with it.

Is the making of this seemingly useless boat a waste of time? Not if we can profit from feeling good about being in the presence of something beautiful. No, decidedly not. Not if making sure we remember where we came from is an important thing. If you think only in terms of efficient transportation, there is no practical purpose for this boat now. Compared to motorized craft, it is slow and uses a lot of muscular effort. So why do it? Well, for some people, those who feel a connection to the ways that things were done in the past, there is a satisfaction, almost a compelling need, to recreate the tools that accomplished those things. This skiff is one of those tools. And it is beautiful. Looking at it allows you to drift back in time to small bayous and quiet cypress forests. It feels good to look at it, and imagine where it could have taken you.

The river is at 4.3 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge today, falling slowly to about 3.5 feet over the next week. The Mississippi has a small rise coming but the Ohio has nothing to back it up at this time. Looks like we are in for the low water season for sure.

Rise and Shine, Jim

Five Candles

Just a whim, this. A couple days ago I took pictures of water hyacinth flowers for my "Life at Butte La Rose" catalogue and was surprised to find candles burning in every flower. Had never noticed them before. How many times (hundreds) had I looked at these flowers? Apparently not enough times to see them.

The river is at 7.5 on the Butte La Rose gauge. It will be at about 2.8 feet in a week. That is a FAST drop. The Mississippi and Ohio are emptying out to the low end of the cycle.

Rise and Shine, Jim

Basin Bedding

When bedding was needed, what were the materials available to people in houseboats in the first half of the 1900s and before? The materials were feathers, corn shucks, moss and the fabrics to enclose these things.

Feathers were most often derived from wild ducks and geese, particularly the down and other soft feathers. Chickens were also used when available. Pillows were made of feathers and so were thin mattresses that were often placed on top of other, loftier, materials. Sheets were made out of yellow cotton, as described by Lena Mae Couvillier and her sister-in-law Margaret Neal. Pillow cases were also made with flour sacks, feed sacks or yellow cotton (unbleached muslin). The latter came on rolls or flat bolts.

JD: So, uh, flour sacks and cow feed sacks were mostly…and they had patterns on em, you said. Where would yall get the thread and needles and everything to sew with?

MN. We’d get em off those fishboats. Order em. They had all kinds, they had to be all kinds. They all in a pack, all five.

JD: How about sheets for the beds?

LC: You make em. Yellow cotton.

MN: You buy that by the yard, make your sheets with.

LC: Sheets and pillow cases.

JD: And…and the fishboat would have that too?

MN: You’d order it. They’d bring it to you.


In addition to sheets, quilts would be made using traditional quilting techniques and items from the fishboats. The other material needed for making the mattresses was the cloth that enclosed whatever the mattress was made of. This cloth was called ticking.

Corn shucks were one of the two materials that were routinely made into mattresses. The shucks were stuffed into mattress-sized bags. These were common enough, but were not the preferred mattresses. The primary objection to them seems to be that they were very loud when the person resting on them moved in any way. Just turning on them was enough to wake people up, even without the more rhythmic sounds that one might imagine.

“Make a lot of noise, it rattle a lot, when you roll…move on it? It rattled, you know” [Edward Couvillier; 1995]

By far the most often mentioned material for mattresses is dried, black moss. This is the same moss that had income potential when gathered alive (“green moss”) from trees in the swamp and processed to remove the soft, living outer coat, leaving only the very durable non-living inner core of the plant. This core was dark brown to black. While most of the moss was sold, some was retained for use in building mattresses to sleep on. Most of the time it was the women who created these essential items for the family.

To make the moss mattresses, the ticking was spread on the floor and the processed black moss was spread out to a thickness of about 24 inches on one-half of it. The ticking was then folded over “taco fashion” and the seams all around the three open sides were sewn together. A long needle, ten inches or so, was then taken and threaded through the bag of moss at intervals of about 12 inches, creating a network of bindings that tended to keep the enclosed moss from shifting inside the bag. If done expertly, the finished mattress was rectangular, about a foot thick, with sides that almost created 90-degree angles with the top and bottom. Achieving such a regular, well-defined shape was a matter of pride.

Apparently, after sleeping on a moss mattress for a while the moss would compress into clumps and, to remain comfortable to sleep on, these clumps had to be pulled apart and restored to the the springiness they originally had. In a large family, some women would require that every two weeks one of the family’s mattresses would be unsewn, washed, and the clumps pulled apart. Much of this work was done by the children, reluctantly. As they were being picked apart and fluffed up, the clumps were not to be treated so roughly that the individual moss fibers would be broken, but only gently pulled apart. In all the thirty-something people interviewed for this topic, not one remembered the de-clumping (“picking”) procedure with fondness.

Lena Mae’s brother Milton, who grew up to be one of the best fishermen at Myette Point, was not good at doing this chore, resorting to hiding the evidence when he did it inexpertly.


EC: Yeah. You didn’t break it, now, you didn’t want to break it loose, you just fluff it up, you know?

LC: [.. . .] Not Milton, he break it up and go throw it back…Go throw it back of a tree somewhere, where Momma and them couldn’t find it.

JD: Well, was that one of the harder parts of living on a houseboat, was keeping the mattress in good shape?


Lena Mae’s outlook on having to do unpleasant jobs is interesting.


LC: Aw, it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t really hard. It was just…like you do now, you know, you can make it what you want.


People say that this type of bedding was comfortable to recline on, but sleeping on it was easier in the winter than in the summer. Due to the nature of the material, and depending on whether the mattress was firmly stuffed or more soft, anyone lying on it could sink into the mattress and become almost enclosed by it. This was very warm in the winter, even when there was ice in the house in the mornings, and correspondingly uncomfortably hot in the summer.

The mattresses were either placed on the floor or used on top of an iron bed frame with a set of springs on it. Margaret Couvillier Neal and her husband Floyd Mayon had a small two-room houseboat (one kitchen, one everything else) and a big family to put to sleep at night. She talks with humor about this with sister-in-law Lena Mae Couvillier.

MN: I just had three beds, one room, with three beds in it. You couldn’t pass, hardly, between the beds. [laughs] I had six girls and uh, five boys.

JD: Well, with just two mattresses, could you split em up boys and girls?

MN: Yeah. It was rough, but, we made it. The good Lord was with us.

Neg Sauce has good memories of what life was like in the houseboats. After sleeping on the moss mattresses, he remembers what it was like to get up in the morning.

“The first thing that I start doing…you go to the edge of the camp and you wash your face with that nice cool water in the bayou. [. . .]…catch it with your hands, boy...wash your face with it and make you feel fresh [laughs]. Yeah, it was nice. I still would like to do that [laughs], catch you water out of the side…And then you get up and drink you coffee like we always do now.” [Neg Sauce; 1996]

Perhaps that ability to get up in the morning and feel good about the day and yourself was part of the reason these folks could keep going day after day, season after season, adapting to a life that had many challenges. A good night’s sleep was probably one of the reasons those challenges could be met successfully.

The river is at 7.4 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, high for this time of year. But the bottom is going to fall out this week coming. In five days the water is predicted to fall 3.5 feet. That is a fast drop at any time. Anyone with things floating along the bank of the river better pay attention or their things will be stuck until next year, probably.

Rise and Shine, Jim

Basin Law and Order

How would it work if we just decided one day to suspend the 911 service, including the calls to the fire department, the police or sheriff’s department? How would it be if our rights, or life, or property was being threatened and there was no institutional authority to call? It is what happened to the people who lived in the Atchafalaya Basin in the 1800s and early 1900s. It is interesting to wonder if they knew that they were giving up access to law enforcement when they decided to move farther and farther back into the Basin in pursuit of the swamp’s resources. Indeed, whether they cared? Today this would be one of the first issues we might consider, but oddly, it did not seem to deter them from voluntarily choosing isolation. Perhaps it is a case of not missing what you never had? When you ask the interview questions about law enforcement, people shrug their shoulders and respond with “there wasn’t any”. In pursuit of more detail you can push on with questions about sheriffs or their deputies, and the answer is the same. There just wasn’t any.

However, if you lived on the edges of the Basin instead of in the interior, things could be different with respect to the legal attention paid to situations. The landing at the foot of the Attakapas Canal on Lake Verret was close enough to Napoleonville (eight miles by road) to receive direction from the Assumption Parish sheriff’s department. One of the Myette Point ancestors was known to cause trouble when he came to town, and the sheriff chose to address the potential problem by banning the individual from using the landing at all. This would have been about 1850.

“They used to do all their business at Attakapas Landing. Yeah, that’s it. And he’s the one I was telling you that…uh, that grandpa Sead’s daddy, he was so…such a bad character, that the sheriff wouldn’t even let him land at Attakapas Landing anymore.” [EJ Daigle, 1995]


But even in the interior of the Basin, in some rare instances, particularly those involving murder, cases came to the attention of federal authorities. Why some criminal acts were addressed this vigorously and others not, is not known. This particular time, a man accused of murder was traced by federal marshals to Hog Island, about ten miles south of Bayou Chene. They showed up looking for him and a fishboat came in and docked about the same time. The fishboat operator saw what was happening and told the marshals that he needed to leave and continue on in his boat. Knowing the close association between the fishermen and the fishboat operators, the marshal suspected the murderer would get help from the fishboat. The names are masked in the following account by Edward Couvillier, who would have been a teenager at the time and living on Hog Island.

EC: I remember old [. . .] He killed a man. And he came down there between Hog Island and Keelboat. Marshal came down there to look for him, and they got everybody in one house, made everybody stay together, didn’t let nobody leave. [. . .] pulled up, [. . .] on his fishboat, and he was gonna leave and that marshal told him “No, you got to stay here” he says. He was afraid he would go pick him up and take him, you see. That’s what he didn’t want. “No” he say, “I’m gone”. He pulled out that big old gun, he put it in the back of his head, he say “You gone stay”.

JD: When was that Edward?

EC: Aw, that was in the ‘40s. Way back in the ‘40s. At Keelboat [Pass] and Hog Island. Got on that island between Keelboat and Hog Island. And they finally caught him, but it took about three or four days with bloodhounds. They got back in there with bloodhounds, got him out.

JD: And what…what was it that had happened? He had…

EC: He had killed a man, [. . .]

JD: And did he get taken off to jail, and everything?

EC: Oh yeah, they hauled him off.

Apparently insults were dealt with by direct confrontation. Fist fighting was the usual method of confrontation between men, with the parties afterward refraining from communication with the other family for a period of time. Most of the time affronts would be forgotten in a year or less, and communication would resume. Serious disagreements, such as the accusation of fish theft, might require longer than a year to subside. As a young man, Myon Bailey was involved in the question of fish theft and fought with his accuser, falling overboard and causing his wife to miscarry their first child. Five years later the parties reconciled their differences and became good friends, but it took that long.

“And he come and attack on me at my camp. When he hit me he knocked me overboard. When I got outta there we got hooked up [tangled fighting]. And Blaise come there and separate us, and then Blaise went to whip Alvin’s ass. It was a big coulou. We stayed about five years I guess. Caused her to lose her first baby. [Myon Bailey, 1995]

Generally, theft seems to have had a kind of sliding scale of degree vs. reaction. It was understood by just about everybody that there was a line between what the victim could be expected to shrug off with a verbal exchange and what required a direct physical response. The known temper and physical capability of a potential victim might have had an influence on what a thief planned to do.

According to interviews, the theft of timber was a common thing in the first half of the 1900s. There was so much timber, and the territory was so big, and the patrolling of it so sparse, that many people routinely made part of their living by cutting cypress and tupelo and hiding it for later removal to a sawmill. And you had to hide the trees you cut so that other people looking to do the same thing you were doing didn’t come along and steal the logs you had just “acquired”. Myon’s daughter, Lena Mae Couvillier, says “They had to, ‘cause they’d steal em. That’s why they’d hide em. “

Firearms for legal purposes were a common tool in the Basin. They were used for hunting game so much that no one thought anything of seeing people carrying rifles or shotguns. So it was that if a disagreement over something occurred there may have been a gun to settle it. It was this availability that could be dangerous at times. There are several well-known instances of arguments being settled by the death by gunshot of one of the people involved. Most of these cases, however not all, were the end result of longstanding disagreements not of issues that just flared up suddenly.

One such situation is well documented, and it occurred in Iberia Parish. It was near the place then called Grand Bayou. This is the waterway on the west side of the Basin that fed Lake Fausse Point from the Atchafalaya River system prior to the levee blocking Grand Bayou. There was a community there for a while. The story goes like this. One man was in the small store getting supplies and he looked through the front door and saw someone else about to enter the store. The first man told the store owner that he didn’t want to talk to the incoming second man and left the store. He walked to his pirogue and got in and began to paddle away down the bayou along the bank. The second man came up to the bank and began to walk along the bank harassing the first man in the pirogue. After a short time, the man in the pirogue lifted a shotgun loaded with buckshot and fired at the man on the bank, hitting him in the body with several of the pellets. As the man fell, he told a friend “He’s killed me”. And he died. The sheriff of Iberia Parish arrested the first man and took him to jail in New Iberia. A hearing was held during which an attempt was made to determine if self defense was involved. Eyewitnesses testified that the man on the bank was not threatening the man in the pirogue except verbally. It was shown he had no weapon but a very small pocketknife. No self defense was justified. However, the victim’s records were reviewed and it was found that there had been complaints filed against him for assault with a weapon, and other complaints involving intimidation, etc. The hearing officer ruled that the homicide had been justifiable based on the dead man’s antisocial character. End of case. Being that formal complaints had previously been filed, the incident must have been within reach of the New Iberia system of law. If this had happened farther out in the Basin it is doubtful if complaint records would have existed.

Running someone else’s fishing lines almost always brings about a potentially violent reaction from the wronged party. The most often mentioned weapon is the paddle kept in the boat. Ida Daigle (born in 1918) caught a man stealing fish from her lines once. She says.

“[. . .] He had all my fish in his boat. And I went right up to him, too. I put my paddle, though, by me. He’d a made a pass at me I’d’a hit him with my paddle. And uh, I went right up to him. [. . .] “I did good!” he say. I say “Where’s your lines?” “Oh, here and there”. I say “You know darn well you lyin” I say “You ain’t got a line in yuh.” I say “Them fish is mine” I say “Throw em in my boat”. [. . .] I say “I’m gone hit you in the…I’m gone hit you with this paddle”. And I had…Russell had made me a big, heavy paddle.
And I say “I’m goin bait my line and tomorrow” I say “ I’m gone be here earlier than what you is” and I say “Look” I say “if I see you on a line” I say “you gone stay there” But I didn’t have no gun with me [means she was bluffing]. [laughs]. I never brought no gun with me. But he got scared. The next day I went and filled up my wellbox. It was my fish.” [Ida Daigle, 1996]

Infidelity was as frequent as with any other group of individuals. Sometimes it happened. The unwritten law was that if a couple was discovered while so engaged, the consequences were up to the wronged man. If he chose, he could shoot the other man, and the woman too for that matter, and no law would punish him. Sometimes the offended person just didn’t think the issue was worth the trouble and just walked away, but sometimes not.

We wonder at the flexibility of what we think of as the system of crime and punishment in the Basin in the first half of the 1900s. But it is a difficult assessment to make. From our position in a much more monitored and regulated society, it is unrealistic to assess someone else’s reactions that took place in a time and place unfamiliar to us. People who lived 150 years ago in the Atchafalaya Basin lived by the codes they inherited from previous generations. If these progenitors lived in conditions far removed from organized law enforcement, they learned to function within a set of rules that had proven through time to work well enough to let people get on with life. Live and let live seems to be what evolved as a guide for most people. If this system at least allowed individuals to live their lives without the constant fear of threat to life or property, it seems to have been enough.

The river is playing tricks. It went down to five feet last week and I dug out the lower-level platforms that lead to the crib and dock when they are far away from the bank in low water. Now the river is coming back up to at least seven feet and maybe more due to rain in Ohio. Oh well. It ain’t boring.

The black and white picture is from the collection of Darlene Soule'.

The river is at 6.0 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, rising to 7.8 feet by next Friday. The Ohio and Mississippi are really rising up above. We could get some serious mid-summer water this year, not flooding, but higher than usual anyway.

Rise and Shine, Jim

Earnings and Prices

Going far back into the last century, and beyond a little bit, it is interesting to see what kind of prices existed for things the Basin fishermen sold and bought. Some of the prices received for things like fish and moss were low, as expected, but then so were the prices of much of the material they needed to buy. Catfish in 1900 were bringing 5¢ to 8¢ a pound, while the other saleable item, dried moss, brought 1.5¢ a pound. This provided the primary income for families in the swamp that were harvesting Basin resources.

The other source of income was work in the timber industry. In the early 1920s and 19 teens, men cut timber for 50¢ a day. By 1932 the wage was up to $1.50 a day for deadening cypress, and presumably the other jobs that people did in that industry were similar.

The income from selling fish dropped for most people during the Depression (~ 1930 to 1942) from about 8¢ a pound to 3¢. There are occasional reports of eight and even 10¢ but not many. Moss seems to have increased in value somewhat before 1930, but following the trend in those years, seems to have dropped from 3¢ to 1¢ a pound during those economically stressful times.

When World War II began, it signaled the end of the Depression, and prices began to rise. In 1944, catfish were bringing pre-Depression prices of about 10¢ a pound in most docks, as dated from the statement that follows (using the memories of births in a family). EJ Daigle remembers his father fishing about that time.

“[. . .] my Daddy, before Leroy was born, when Momma was pregnant for Leroy [1945], Daddy said he made big money at 10¢ a pound. Those big blue cats in that current off of Myette Pt. [. . .] [EJ Daigle, 1995]

And by 1949, prices of fish had risen to an all-time high. Russell Daigle testifies to this.


“Them days, buffalo was worth 30¢ a pound, gous worth 30¢, 40¢ a pound. Catfish uh, they had a better price then than what they got now. They’d always average say from 45 to 65¢ a pound. The low point was about 45, the high point about 65 [cents a pound].” [Russell Daigle, 1996]


The fishboat added value to the fish they bought by assuming the responsibility for delivering the fish from the fishermen to the dock for processing and shipping. For this service they added a certain amount per pound to what they paid the fishermen. The amount they made per pound when the fish were delivered to the dock varied with the period discussed but seems to have been from 3¢ to 5¢ a pound.

An interesting anomaly took place somewhere around 1959 when the two species of catfish (the blue and channel, aka eel cat) were separated with respect to value. Instead of being considered together, for some reason blue catfish were valued at a higher rate than channel catfish. Overabundance of channel catfish may have been the answer to this, described as a glut by fishermen.

This artificial separation of the species soon ended, and the price of both species of catfish gradually settled at about 25¢ per pound. That’s rough fish, as caught, not filleted or collarbone cleaned, but as caught. That price remained until 1974, when the fishermen united in an attempt to form a buying and processing cooperative for fish caught in the Atchafalaya Basin. It was during the time that this venture was in the process of development that the docks doubled the price to the fishermen - from 25¢ to 50¢ a pound. This was the first time the price had been that high since 1949. That price remains to this day – 50¢ a pound. For unanticipated competitive reasons, the fishermen’s cooperative only progressed to the advanced planning stage.

Fish was the main source of income other than work in the lumber industry, and the latter petered out in the 1940s. But compared to today it didn’t take very much money to support a good life in the Basin. People talk about how much it took to produce a good living for line fishermen. Lena Mae Couvillier and her husband Edward:

LC: [. . .] We wasn’t in debt. Didn’t owe nobody.

EC: You could live on $25 a week. Live good too!


Even though it was a seasonal activity, trapping could be a big part of the income for Basin people. Muskrats were the foundation of trapping, especially along the coast, but the coming of nutria was a big boost, temporarily at least. It took only a few years for this artificially introduced mammal to reproduce into harvestable numbers, and by 1946 it had spread from coastal marshes to the Basin and was just then being harvested there for the first time. Russell Daigle was one of the first to catch nutria in the Basin and had these memories.

RD: On the end of the bars, when the end of the bars got about even with, uh, the lower end of Goat Island. They were trappin them bars out there. And uh, we caught a neutral [nutria]. And from then on it’s started showin up thick, they comin from up north, I guess.

JD: Yall didn’t know what to do with em?

RD: No, come to find out they were worth good money. We get about $7.00 a piece for em. They were worth real good money! Them days, look, $7.00 a lot of money. You go catch seven, eight a day? Made a big year there, with them neutrals. [laughs].

Some of the other items for which there is a record of prices paid or the cost of purchasing are also part of the interview material contributed by the Myette Point families. Freshwater crabs were sold to the processing factories in Morgan City for 3¢ a pound in 1945. Flour cost 40¢ a sack. Gasoline 20¢ a gallon.

In 1940 they sold a pair of mallard ducks for 50¢. They could handmake durable swivels out of a nail and a piece of wire to sell to other fishermen for $1.25 a hundred. They could make ½ inch-mesh shrimp dipnets for $1.50 each. Bullfrogs and pigfrogs were caught in the Basin in large numbers but there was no market for them in the 1930s.

“No, they wasn’t worth nothin then. And they didn’t really…you couldn’t hardly sell em…at that time.” [Lena Mae Couvillier, 1997]

Being able to live on houseboats and gain income from fishing, and also carry the responsibility for owning property was sometimes not possible, or desired. Taxes on property, often the property that had been settled by the same individuals who moved permanently onto houseboats, were not regarded as serious issues by many people, and so their lands were forfeited to the legal process. Myon Bailey and his wife Agnes talk about their relationship to taxes and property.

MB: [. . .] Fourmile Bayou, a lawyer come and see me one time, about taxes, said nobody ain’t payin taxes. Say if yall don’t pay the taxes …ain’t gone be yours. So I paid the taxes that year [~1950], and that’s it, I didn’t pay it no more. Years ago, when we first moved at Myette Pt. On the bank .

AB: Yeah.

MB: I never did pay it no more, and it was only $3.90 a year.

JD: How much property was involved?

MB: Nineteen acres. It’s a oil company come and see me. They want to lease it.


So, during the Basin houseboat years, from 1900 to about 1950, line fishermen didn’t have large incomes, but they didn’t have large expenses either. During the time when catfish brought 10¢ a pound to the fishermen, they could achieve the desired $5.00 a day with 50 pounds of catfish. Fishing for the big goujons could bring that with one fish. Earlier prices of 3¢ might bring less income, but that was at a time when expenses were less too. All in all, people could make a good living linefishing in the Atchafalaya Basin during the houseboat years and thereafter until the 1980s. After that, competition from farm-raised fish reduced the market for wild catfish to the extent that linefishing for them was no longer worthwhile in Grand Lake. Except for those caught by a few netfishermen, the docks have almost quit buying wild catfish from the Grand Lake area. For the most part, because of the competition with the more uniformly-sized pond catfish, only small fish are bought now and those in amounts insufficient to support a linefisherman and his family. And the price to the fisherman that was elevated to 50¢ a pound in 1974 is still that, or less, for wild catfish.

The river is at 11.5 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, falling slowly to 10.5 by next Friday, and probably falling after that. The Mississippi and Ohio are both falling all the way up.

Rise and Shine, Jim