Gueydan smelled like booze for days after thousands of bottles of illegal liquor were smashed on a railroad siding there in 1929. Some of the citizenry kept a faint odor and a happy smile for months after they rescued bottles that didn’t get smashed.
Prohibition was in full effect in June 1929, when, according to the Abbeville Meridional, “considerable excitement was occasioned when it became known that a car containing about 1,000 cases of liquor [had been discovered] in the S. P. freight yard” in the Vermilion Parish community.
The excitement began when a man calling himself R. L. Kellogg showed up at the Southern Pacific depot to see about getting a box car that was supposedly filled with sacks of rice chaff to a company in New Jersey. When railroad clerk John Beauxis went to see about it, he found that the sacks had been loaded into a car that was not supposed to carry rice chaff.
He became suspicious about the deal when Kellogg offered him $1,000 to let the car go anyway. The clerk refused the offer and got in touch with a regional supervisor to ask what should be done. The supervisor said to take a closer look at the sacks.
When Mr. Kellogg heard that news, he fainted dead away. That made Beauxis even more suspicious. While he inspected the box car the second time, Kellogg recovered from his swoon and, the Meridional said, “quietly departed, leaving Gueydan by the Abbeville road.”
The closer examination revealed that each sack, along with some rice chaff, held half a case of illegal hooch — good stuff, too: French champagne, White Satin gin, Haig & Haig and Cutty Sark scotch.
It wasn’t exactly clear how the liquor got to Gueydan, but everyone surmised that it had come from big boats that regularly anchored at a certain spot in international waters off the Vermilion Parish coast and sent loads of bootleg liquor inland in smaller craft.
At any rate, as Patricia S. Heard describes in an essay about the incident, “no time was wasted before [Prohibition agents] in black cars and fedoras pulled up in great numbers at the tiny … railway station.” The agents said the booze had to be destroyed and recruited a gang of local men who used mallets to beat the sacks and throw them out of the box car. It turned out that this was not the most efficient way to do the job.
As Heard found out, “Certainly some of the bottles were broken. The town smelled like whiskey for a couple of days,” but “it is said that at least one-half to three-quarters of the liquor survived.” Some cynics suspect the shoddy work might have been done on purpose.
“Other locals were standing nearby, opening the sacks and pulling out all of the bottles that were still intact. ,,, Enough did in fact survive to keep the local population well supplied for months. There was no need to make homemade wine or beer during the summer of ’29,” Heard writes.
Another piece of the story came out several weeks later, in early July, when the Meridional reported the arrest of Clarence Arbaugh, who ran a cafe on the wharf at Lake Arthur. It seems that Clarence sometimes used the name of R. L. Kellogg, and when the feds arrested him in Lake Arthur, “he suffered another ‘heart attack’ similar to the one he suffered in Gueydan.”
His feigned attack had helped him to escape from Gueydan, but it didn’t work this time. He was at first “lodged in the Jeff Davis parish jail as a suspect in a great bootlegging conspiracy,” and was later taken to federal court in Opelousas to face charges of conspiring to violate the National Prohibition Act.
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.
