Metairie: A Tongue of Land and Pasture

By Henry C. Bezou

A surprising journey through the history and growth of this large city neighboring New Orleans.

While New Orleans is recognized the world over for the French Quarter and Mardi Gras, Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, is not as well known. But Metairie has a rich history all its own. What was described two centuries ago as “a tongue of land to lend pasturage” has become the second largest unincorporated city in the nation.

The explorer La Salle noticed the river bend that is now Metairie when he descended and ascended the Mississippi River in the spring of 1682. Almost simultaneously with the founding of New Orleans in 1718, John Law’s Company of the West began granting land to European investors and to a handful of Canadians struggling to survive along the Gulf Coast. The settlers helped feed the city, provided it with critical building materials, and enhanced its value as a port.

As with many colonial frontiers throughout the history of the world, missionaries stood in the vanguard of Metairie’s evolution. French and Spanish friars, then European priests, and finally native clergy provided leadership and stability as a progressive community began to emerge from the marsh and swamp. This book tells the story of this oft-overlooked Louisiana city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 31, 1997
• ISBN: 9781455608805

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

River and Ridge, Bayous and Burnt Canes

Vital is the river, known to the Indians as the Father of Waters. Strong is the Mississippi, likened to an army intent on invasion of the land. But a landbearer is the Mississippi in a guise too often forgot: Heavy runs the alluvial river, pregnant with land seeking to be born . . .

Hodding Carter, Man and the River: The Mississippi

For centuries many tributaries have nourished the Mississippi River as it meanders some 2,348 miles from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

The insatiable stream has given generously of what it has received—countless tons of water and waste, silt and sand, loam and vegetation. Sediment, dropped as the river merged with the Gulf of Mexico, formed the St. Bernard delta in ages past.

As it coursed gulfwards, the river at various times split into channels called distributaries, many of which it later bypassed. The most noticeable and noteworthy of abandoned distributaries, within what geologists call the Pontchartrain Basin, is the Bayou Metairie-Gentilly-Sauvage system.

Metairie Bayou originated some six centuries before the Christian era, when the roiling Mississippi crossed its own natural banks between present-day Kenner and Little Farms. River silt borne over low banks built up a ridge on each side of the bayou and its continuation through Gentilly Bayou and Bayou Sauvage. The adjacent shallow waters of swamp and marsh also received sediments which spread north towards what is now Lake Pontchartrain and eastward as far as the Rigolets. The ridges or natural levees began at the outskirts of Kenner, where they are still about a mile wide and seven feet high. They narrowed gradually until they finally lost surface expression in the vicinity of Chef Menteur Pass.

Metairie Bayou began dying of thirst before the white man arrived in Louisiana. As it pushed gulfwards, the bayou lengthened its channel, reduced its fall per mile and consequent velocity, filling its own channel as do all river outlets, natural or artificial. Early settlers found remnants of the bayou, which they leveed off from the river and deprived of water supply. Exactly when the bayou system died is unknown, but there is no record of its being navigated by sizeable boats. Prehistoric Indians, though, probably could and did travel on it in their dugouts.

Bayou St. John, sometimes called an interloper between Bayou Metairie and Bayou Gentilly, is actually a channel formed by water impounded within the large area of the future City of New Orleans and the ridge. Bayou St. John has also been attributed to a shallow geological fault or fracture. In the judgment of some engineers, Metairie Bayou and Bayou Gentilly-Sauvage flowed as one stream approximately where Grand Route St. John is today. If such was the case, then the bend in Bayou St. John between Esplanade Avenue and Harding Drive may have been part of Metairie Bayou.

The rich alluvial Metairie-Gentilly Ridge has supported masses of reeds, thickets of cane, tall grasses, palmettos, and trees of the beech family such as live, water, pin, and willow oak. Southern Cottonwood, black willow, hackberry, magnolia, and Southern sweet bay also have long thrived on the ridge. When the aborigines and, later, French explorers penetrated the adjacent areas, they had to trudge through spongy marshes, wet lands, and stands of sweetgum, redgum, and liquidambar. The cypress, tupelo, and hickory swamps had an aspect quite similar to some of the terrain still viewed by the motorist as he drives along Interstate Highway 10 between Kenner and Laplace.

The first recorded encounter between white man and red man in the lower delta took place in 1682 when Robert Cavelier de La Salle came down the Mississippi on his way to the Gulf. Accompanied by 22 armed Frenchmen, 31 friendly Indians including 10 squaws and 3 children, a notary named Jacques de La Métairie1 and the Recollect² missionary Father Zenobius Membré, La Salle had entered the Mississippi from the Illinois River on February 13. The Indians of the time called the Mississippi by various descriptive names of their tribal tongues: the Malbrancia, Misisipi, Michi Sepe, Chucagua, Tamalisieu, Tapatu, ad Mico, and Ochechiton. La Salle referred to it as the Colbert, after Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, French minister of marine, and later, minister of state for King Louis XIV. The river would long appear on maps as Le Fleuve Saint-Louis, the St. Louis River.

¹ As will be indicated in Chapter Five, the place named Metairie probably did not originate with the notary.

² The Recollects were a branch of the Franciscan Order.

The La Salle expedition passed in early April the banks of the Mississippi at or near the head of the Metairie distributary. La Métairie recounts on April 3,1682:

At ten in the morning we saw in the canes thirteen or fourteen pirogues. M. de La Salle debarked with some of his company. We noticed a number of traces; a little farther down, we saw some Savages who were fishing but who, having detected us, left the place and fled. We touched ground on the edge of a marsh caused by the flooding of the river. M. de La Salle sent two Frenchmen on reconnaissance and then two Savages who reported that there was a village close by; that, to reach it, one had to cross this whole marsh covered with canes; that they had been attacked with flying arrows by those in the place who did not dare engage themselves in the marsh and had fallen back, despite the fact that neither the French nor the Savages with them wished to fire their arms, according to the instructions that they were to do no such thing except in an emergency. Soon we heard the beating of a drum in the village, and the shouts and abusive cries with which these barbarians are accustomed to attack [their enemies]. We heard them for three or four hours, and since we could not camp in the marsh, [after] seeing no one and hearing nothing more we embarked.

The expedition continued downstream for three days before reaching the passes leading into the Gulf. On April 9, La Salle, in the name of his sovereign, took official possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, people, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers within its expanse. La Métairie composed the act of possession, writing that La Salle, having said that His Majesty, as eldest son of the Church, would add to his crown no nation where His principal care would not tend towards the establishment of the Christian religion, had a large cross erected on the spot. Father Membré" led in the singing of the Te Deum,3 the Vexilla Regis,4 and the Domine, salvum fac regem.⁵ Louisiana began on a resoundingly religious note.

³ The most famous non-biblical hymn in the Western Church to express thanksgiving; the text dates back to the Fifth Century.

⁴ The hymn concerning the mystery of the cross; it was written by Venantius Fortunatus (530-609).

Two years later, during an abortive attempt to enter the Mississippi from its mouth, La Salle died at the hands of his own men. Father Anastase Douay, who had accompanied the explorer, found his way, afoot and by canoe, back to Canada from Texas. Fifteen years later, the missionary still had the stamina to join the 1699 expedition of Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, up the Mississippi. It was Father Douay, more than any other member of the Iberville party, who could confidently assure the leader that he had indeed entered the river of de La Salle at its mouth. As the historian J. B. Bénard de La Harpe notes, Father Anastase recognized it because of the turbulence of its waters.

On March 3, 1699, Father Anastase celebrated, with Iberville and his men as a congregation, the first Mass on Louisiana soil. A few miles farther up the river, he offered Mass the next day, Ash Wednesday, when he also blessed and distributed ashes. By the following Saturday, March 7, the explorers encamped somewhere within the future metropolitan area, since they were then thirty leagues⁶ up the river. A narrator of the voyage tells of their encounter with the local Indians on that date:

At nine o'clock, in ranging along the river we saw three buffaloes lying down on the bank. We landed five men to go in pursuit of them, which they could not do, as they soon got lost in the thick forest and canebrakes. A short time after, in turning a point, we saw a canoe manned by two Indians, who took to land the moment they saw us and concealed themselves in the woods. A little farther on we saw five more who executed the same manoeuvre, with the exception of one, who waited for us at the brink of the river. We made signs to him. M. d'Iberville gave him a knife, some beads and some trinkets. In exchange he gave us some dried boar's meat. M. d'Iberville commanded all of our men to go on board the longboats for fear of intimidating him, and made signs to him to recall his comrades. They came singing their song of peace, extending their hands towards the sun and rubbing their stomachs, as a sign of admiration and joy. After joining us they placed their hands upon their breasts and extended their arms over our heads as a mark of friendship. M. d'Iberville asked them, by signs, if their village was far off. They told him it was five days' journey hence.

⁵ Literally, Lord, save the King.

⁶ A league is an ancient, variable linear measurement. By French computation, a marine league is approximately three miles; a land league about 20 percent shorter.

On Sunday, March 8, Father Anastase celebrated Mass, presumably on Jefferson Parish soil or slightly above it. It is probable that Indians who were accustomed to traversing the Metairie Ridge made their initial contacts with a missionary at this time.

Iberville did not descend the Mississippi River to the Gulf during his first 1699 expedition. At the suggestion of his Indian guides, as well as his brother Bienville's newly-found friends among the Bayougoula and Mougoulacha Indians, then settled above present-day Donaldsonville, Iberville gained the Gulf Coast by way of the Ascantia River (later named the Iberville, and still later, Manchac Bayou) and through Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain.

On a subsequent exploratory voyage, he re-entered Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf by way of the Rigolets. One member of this reconnoitering contingent, André Pénicaut, a ship's carpenter, records that:

We found a big lake which M. deBienville named Lake Pontchartrain. This lake is twenty-eight leagues in circumference and seven across. Its mouth at the entrance is a quarter of a league across from right to left, and both sides of this entrance are covered with shells in such great quantities that they form banks; accordingly it was given the name Pointe-aux-Coquilles. After one enters this watercourse and sails upward for a league and a half from the entrance, he finds on his left a point called Pointe-aux-Herbes; here we sheltered our longboats, because this lake is so shallow that boats are always being lost here in rough weather. Six leagues farther up the lake, a small river flows into it which is called, in savage, Choupitcatcha; the French call it today Rivière d'Orléans because afterwards (as will be shown at the proper time) there was built near this river, one league away from the lake, the town of New Orleans.

Before reaching the Rivière d'Orléans (Bayou St. John) the explorers had passed four bayous which belong to the Metairie distributary system: Bayou de Lassaire⁷ near the Rigolets and Lake St. Catherine; Stump Bayou, below Pointe-aux-Herbes; Bayou Pecoin slightly to the west of the Pointe, perhaps the place which fishermen today know as Irish Bayou; and Turtle Bayou, a little to the southwest. After leaving Bayou St. John, they observed at close range the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain which is now part of Jefferson Parish. At a distance of some five leagues from Bayou St. John, they came to a "stagnant body of water that the savages called bayouque," either Bayou Piquant or Bayou LaBranche according to some authorities.⁸ Both are now in St. Charles civil parish, a short distance west of Kenner. Referring either to Bayou Piquant or Bayou LaBranche, Pénicaut continues:

⁷ Also spelled Lesaire.

We made camp near this place [the bayouque] because the savages who were guiding us made us understand that we should go by way of it to the Missicipy River. On the morning of the next day, having left our longboats in the bay, we set out on foot to make our way to the river bank. For three quarters of a league we crossed through a wood filled with cypress . . . coming out of this wood, we entered some tall reeds, or canes . . . After crossing through these canes for a quarter of a league, we reached the bank of the Missicipy. . . . At this place its banks are covered with canes

Later, some unknown explorer noticed a clearing near the place where Pénicaut and his companions viewed the Mississippi from its eastern shore. The place received the name of Cannes Brûlées, literally, Burnt Canes. As the narrator of the first upriver expedition of Iberville noted, the Indians used to clear the land by setting fire to the canes along the banks either to drive out the game or to obtain better access to aim and shoot at us. At any rate, the name Cannes Brûlées became a landmark for early French settlers, a point of reference for mapmakers, and the oldest identified site in East Jefferson.

It is also the original and long-lasting name of the City of Kenner. The city's lower limits are still defined by the area where, long ago, the Mississippi River crossed its natural levee to give birth to Metairie Bayou, Ridge and distributary system.

⁸ Others contend that it was the extinct Bayou Tigouyou.

CHAPTER TWO

Chapitoulas, Choctaws, Colapissas

Bienville, with a Bayagoula chief and a detachment of twelve Canadians, embarked on a felucca and a bark canoe to go make an alliance with the Colapissa nation . . .

J.-B. Bénard de La Harpe, The Historical Journal of the French In Louisiana, entry for May 20, 1699

The word chapitoulas appears in different contexts in Louisiana annals. Long the name of a New Orleans waterfront street, it has also been applied to a coast, a cyprière (cypress swamp), an anse (bend in the river), bayous, a gate (city entrance), a quartier (neighborhood), a mission, a plantation, a road, a wood yard, and a village. In most early documents, the expression is used plurally, Les Chapitoulas, The Chapitoulas.

Folklore has shrouded the word and corrupted its primitive spelling and pronunciation. One often repeated tale relates that a French hunter, seeing some Indians fishing on the banks of a small bayou, asked if there were any fishes there. The native answered, as he pointed to the water, "Choupiques tous là, meaning The choupiques [mudfish] are all there." The Frenchman, continues the story, then gave the name Chapitoulas to the bayou and in time the Indians living along it were called Chapitoulas.

Since the Chapitoulas were an extinct group by the time Frenchmen settled in the delta, the explanation has dubious worth. The original spinner of the tale committed an anachronism and later story tellers perpetuated it.

According to Dr. William A. Reed, an expert on Louisiana place names, Chapitoulas is a combination of three Indian words: hatcha, (river), pit, (at), and toula, (reside). The Chapitoulas, then, when they did exist, were those who resided at the river. Les Chapitoulas, like Cannes Brûlées, in early colonial history designated a precise area along the Mississippi River. Although it is always located on 18th century maps (such as D'Anville's, 1732) as directly below Cannes Brûlées, it came to embrace both right and left banks for a distance of about nine miles by water. As we shall see later, the expression Chapitoulas Coast sometimes took in the river bank all the way to the Vieux Carré.

The memorialist Dumont de Montigny, who left a roughly drawn but graphic sketch of New Orleans and its environs as they appeared in the 1720s, shows a chemin des Chapitoulas leading west from Bayou St. John. This chemin, or road, at that time could have been hardly more than a path or trace. However, it is safe to infer that the passageway owed its origin to the Chapitoulas Indians or that it led to and from their former village along the river. As Dumont's sketch is superimposed on a modern map of the city, the road falls in line with City Park Avenue, a continuation of Metairie Road. For several decades, today's City Park Avenue was designated Metairie Road.

Dumont also outlines what he calls le Petit Bayou, Little Bayou, undoubtedly Bayou Gentilly-Sauvage. Along the double lines showing the waterway, Dumont wrote, "Bayou rempli d'un poisson nommé choupique, (Bayou filled with a fish called choupique.") Local fishermen still catch choupiques and call them so. Citing the Louisiana Department of Conservation as his authority, John Chase in his delightful and illuminating book on the nomenclature of New Orleans streets, Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children, explains:

This ancient and remarkable fish dates back in its family history to the time of the Dinosaurs, and is today the single living member of an entire order of fish . . . The choupique is a nest builder, the male constructing a home and caring for the eggs and young. This species, because of the peculiar structure of its swim bladder is able to breathe air in the same manner as does the gar. Choupiques are astonishingly tough . . . not only will they continue to live in what is practically liquid mud, but they have actually been plowed up in the lowland fields of Louisiana, weeks after the flood waters have fallen and when the land has become dry enough for cultivation to begin.

Already in Dumont's day, the Petit Bayou, Bayou Gentilly-Sauvage, was for a short distance separated by land from Bayou Metairie. However, Dumont's sketch clearly indicates a roadway leading from New Orleans (at what is St. Anne Street in the Vieux Carré) to the Petit Bayou and from it to the "Grand Bayou nommé St. Jean," (the Big Bayou named St. John.) Precisely across the place used for debarking and embarking on Bayou St. John at the portage was the chemin des Chapitoulas.

The Dumont sketch furthermore establishes the geographical and utilitarian relationship between Metairie Bayou and Bayou Gentilly-Sauvage, since it shows a portage from Bayou Gentilly-Sauvage to Metairie Bayou. Pre-historic Indians traveling from Chef Menteur or the Rigolets could paddle along Bayou Sauvage to its headwaters, carry