Merry (Trappers) Christmas, everybody

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Mardi Gras has come and gone, but if you live in the south Louisiana marshland it’s still not too late to follow an old custom and celebrate Christmas.
In the not too distant past, while the rest of the world celebrated Christmas on Dec. 25, trappers in some parts of south Louisiana were scattered across the marsh, working to make the most of the 75-day trapping season that ended in early February.
As state archivist Florent Hardy pointed out in an essay several years ago, “Christmas was a very busy time of year for the fur trappers,” when they were gathering furs that were important to their wallets and to the state economy. Many of them made most — if not all — of the cash money their family would see each year during the trapping season.
On Feb. 25, after the last catches were sold, the trappers and their families gathered to celebrate what became known as Trapper’s Christmas.
The trapping season typically began in late November. By then, several cold fronts had usually passed through the marsh, causing the muskrat’s fur to grow long, thick, and at its best for the market. That was important; the better the pelt, the better the price.
Catching them was serious business for a lot of people. During the early 1900s, Louisiana’s fur industry involved more than 20,000 trappers and 1,000 fur buyers and dealers. In addition, as Jared Boscareno pointed out in a study of the industry, over the years, “a whole host of ancillary interests, such as landowners, equipment salesmen, shipping firms, fur buyers/dealers, and fur designers/manufacturers became dependent on the state’s ability to maintain large harvests.” (The Rise and Fall of the Louisiana Muskrat, 1890-1960, master’s thesis, University of New Orleans, 2009)
The Louisiana fur trade centered around the muskrat, which was abundant in south Louisiana in the 1900s, when serious commercial trapping began, and apparently had been for some time. When Jesuit priest Father Jacques Gravier traveled through south Louisiana in 1701, he recorded that skins worn by the Houmas came from the “rat musque.”
By the middle 1920s, south Louisiana was the most important fur trapping area in North America, and Terrebonne Parish (where the Houmas once roamed) was the most important area in south Louisiana. In the 1924-25 season, Louisiana trappers took more than six and a half million furs, according to a report in the Houma Courier, and they expected an even better harvest during the winter of 1925-1926.
The Courier reported on Oct. 31, 1925, that “on the Terrebonne [bayou] dozens of houseboats, carrying provisions and trapper’s complete outfits, are seen daily headed for the trapping grounds in the lower part of Terrebonne, in order to be on the ground when the trapping season opens.” National Geographic magazine took notice of that parade in 1930, reporting that the trappers “transport their wives and children to the marshes, set up their tiny huts or convert rafts into houseboats.”
“More than a million and a half dollars’ worth of pelts — minks, coons, muskrats, otters — were shipped out of this parish last season,” the Courier reported in 1925, “notwithstanding the fact that prairie fires destroyed thousands of fur-bearing animals, and did great damage to the … grass … upon which the muskrat subsists.”
The average trapper earned from $2,000 to $4,000 in a season, according to the 1925 Courier article. That was good money. One thousand dollars in 1925 would be equal to about $14,000 today,
The fur harvest peaked at more than 9 million pelts in 1945, then began to decline, partly because of encroachment by man (and his drilling rigs) on muskrat habitat, but mainly because the bigger, stronger, and more aggressive nutria began to take over the marsh and, quite literally, eat the muskrat out of house and home
In the 1940s, a good number of Louisiana’s trappers worked state-owned lands and had to share their take. According to a 1941 news story about the opening of the trapping season, the state licensed 150 trappers to work three Louisiana wildlife sanctuaries that year. Trappers got 65 percent of the profits and the state got 35 percent.
Even with the sharing, there was good money to be made from the public land. When thieves hit the state fur warehouse in Delcambre in January 1940, they made off with muskrat and mink furs worth up to $75,000 in 1940 dollars ($1.3 million today). That news report doesn’t say how many pelts were taken, but the night watchman, who was overpowered and tied up, said the robbers had to make two trips to truck them all away.
Luckily for them, the trappers had already been paid for the furs in the warehouse, so they were still able to enjoy a nice Christmas-in-February.
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.