There wasn’t much to see on the road stretching across the prairie from Opelousas to Lake Charles in the middle 1870s, if accounts from two travelers can be believed.
Lake Charles was the seat of Calcasieu Parish; Opelousas was the St. Landry seat. Calcasieu had been part of St. Landry until 1840, when everything west of the Mermentau had been separated into a parish that was later subdivided into Calcasieu, Cameron, Jeff Davis, Allen, and Beauregard parishes.
A track, euphemistically called a road, ran across the prairie in the pre-Civil War days, when Opelousas was the courthouse town for the whole region and people from across southwest Louisiana had to make their way there to transact parish business. Cattle drovers from what became Calcasieu helped establish the trail as they pushed herds overland to New Orleans or to steamboat ports such as Washington.
Letters from travelers in 1874 and 1875 seem to indicate that the “road” was not much improved a quarter of a century after the parishes were split.
The trail, the unidentified 1874 writer said, “traverses an open prairie country, crossing at intervals the several branches of the Mermentau river” — Bayou Mallet, Bayou des Cannes, and Bayou Nezpique — all of which were “sluggish and unsightly in appearance.”
They did provide a “congenial element for the choupique, goujon [catfish], loggerhead, water moccasin, alligator, and other kindred aquatic animals.” The approaches to the river crossings sometimes provided a view through the trees growing along the banks of “long stretches of open prairie on which wild cattle and horses roam in undisturbed freedom.”
According to this letter, “A traveler possessing an eye for the picturesque and on the lookout for something to relieve the dreary monotony if the journey will not fail, now and then to get a glimpse of landscapes quite as pleasing as anything in southwest Louisiana.” These glimpses, however, were too few and far between to compensate for the dullness of the trip.
Settled communities were also few and far between. Eunice, Crowley, Jennings, and a half-dozen other prairie towns would not be established until the railroad came through in 1880.
Our 1875 letter writer, identified only as J.H.S., stopped first at the Pointe-aux-Loups Springs. “where the venerable proprietor, Mr. A. B. Cart, welcomed us with his usual cordiality.”
By 1875, Antoine Belleair Cart had developed the springs on the upper reaches of Bayou Plaquemine Brûlée into a fashionable health spa. He stumbled on them some years before, when he got sick and his doctor told him to move to a healthier climate in Texas. He was on the way when he stopped at Pointe-aux-Loups, liked the place, and decided to stay. He said the waters there cured his ills, and promised that they would cure whatever ailed anybody else.
The second stop was “at Henry Welch’s.” We know the place today as Welsh, and it also had its start from a man seeking a healthier clime.
Miles Welsh came to Louisiana from Pennsylvania seeking a mild southern climate that alleviate the pains of his rheumatism. He also was headed to Texas. But ended up building a log home on a shady spot on Bayou Lacassine. The Old Spanish Trail passed near the home, and Miles and his wife began to take in stage coach riders, cowboys, mail carriers, and other travelers. Henry Welsh, their oldest son, continued operating the inn and boarding house.
Those were the only two stops mentioned before our 1875 traveler reached Lake Charles, “a little village rapidly increasing in size” because of its growing lumber industry. It sat on the bank of “a pretty little lake whose surface is daily dotted over with both steamers and sailing vessels conveying lumber to Galveston, Corpus Christi, and other points.”
We don’t know why the anonymous 1874 writer made the trip, but J.H.S. traveled to Calcasieu in 1875 to hunt and fish in the piney woods.
He, at least, found the trip across the prairies worth the effort finding “fish and deer in abundance.”
“The fifteen days we spent in the immense pine forests were an uninterrupted series of pleasures,” he wrote. “When we left the quiet solitudes, it was with the mental promise to return if the opportunity should ever again present itself, and enjoy once more the sports of the rod and gun and the quiet and unostentatious hospitality of [the] kind and generous people.”
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
