Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2008 - (Page 92) Ranching the sea of grass An illustrated history of cowboys in Southwest Louisiana covers the trail drives of the 1750s to the few existing ranches of today Like so many things that come to Louisiana and are changed by it, the tradition of cattle ranching bears the unique stamp of our state’s climate, topography, and culture. Bill Jones explores the vast plains and marshes of the “Cajun Prairie,” once home to free-ranging herds of cattle and the men who tended them. Jones’ Louisiana Cowboys, comprised of history, personal narratives, and stunning photographs, captures their laborious, rewarding way of life at the margin of land and ocean. Readers might be vaguely familiar with ranching in Louisiana, but the scale of what Jones describes gives it eye-opening majesty. It’s a bit like finding another world around the next bend — comparable to first seeing endless sugar cane fields along US 90 southeast of Lafayette, or chancing upon Vermillion Bay or Lake Pontchartrain. Plains make up millions of acres covering Louisiana Cowboys by Bill Jones Pelican Publishing: Gretna, La. 208 pages nearly all of Southwest Louisiana, with marshes just to its south that are by turns boggy and slightly less boggy. On this sea of grass, vachers, cowboys, moved giant herds on the open range in a rhythm that changed little from the days of the first settlers until the end of the 20th century. Horses and cattle arrived with Spanish entradas out of Mexico who moved through Texas; Native Americans traded for domesticated animals, and brought them into what is now Louisiana, making it as far as Natchitoches by 1690. By the mid-18th century, cattle were grazing throughout the area, and Rancher Antoine Bernard Dauterive tended over 5,000 head at Opelousas Post, west of the Mississippi River. Once Acadians began to arrive in Louisiana after their exile from Nova Scotia in 1765, it was he who established what came to be known as the “Dauterive Compact,” and Acadians would have the greatest impact on the growth of ranching in Louisiana. Dauterive offered settlers a share of his cattle in return for their skilled labor, and as Jones puts it, “helped start the Acadians on their way to becoming the dominant force in the dominant economic activity of southwestern Louisiana for more than a century, cattle ranching.” By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, less than 40 years later, the number of cattle in the Opelousas District had grown tenfold, to over 50,000. In his report to the U.S. Government, American surveyor William Darby wrote about the area in 1805: “When we estimate the extent of ground that must forever remain covered with grass, it is no extravagant declaration to call this one of the meadows of America.” For most of its history, cattle roamed on open ranges of the Cajun Prairie. With no fences separating the land, herds were run in common from one grazing area to another. This required a high degree of cooperation among ranchers and vachers, particularly important when contending with wild cattle, who can lead some members of a tame herd astray. For Jones, Gray Ranch, near Vinton, Louisiana, is the archetypal well-run operation. His knowledge of the ranch and its workings is encyclopedic; one can sense another story or two waiting in the wings, and his explanations of ranching arcana bring them to life. Gray Ranch was established in the late 19th century by oilman John Gray. Oil wealth enabled the Gray family to “ranch year round without supplemental feeding, a perfect cattle operation for the region, or any region, for that matter.” Over the decades the family acquired further land, expanding from Sabine Lake near the Texas border east to Calcasieu Lake. At the heart of Jones’ work are the 92 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2008
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