How life on the bayou all got started

By Bill Ellzey Correspondent

The Mississippi River’s earliest explorers knew it branched off at present-day Donaldsonville. They called the smaller outlet La Fourche de los Chetimaches, or the fork of the Chitimacha Indians.

The natives, early settlers and generations that followed used Bayou Lafourche to access the rich lands along its banks and establish communities and plantations. Road access was virtually impossible except on dirt tracks along the bayou banks or on ridges. The rest of the area was impassably swampy or marshy.

Canoes, dugouts, skiffs and flatboats brought in goods and passengers, either from the Mississippi River to the north or from bayous connected with the Gulf of Mexico. Eventually, steamboats made scheduled runs between Thibodaux and New Orleans, but after railroads penetrated the low-lying interior about 1855, Bayou Lafourche was dammed off at Donaldsonville to end the threat of annual flooding.

Bayou Terrebonne similarly forked off Bayou Lafourche at Thibodaux, but its connection was allowed to close off naturally because of the expense of keeping it clear of silt and open to navigation.

Terrebonne is “good earth” in English, but the bayou was first named “Darbonne,” after an early settler. It was renamed “Terrebonne” by Henry Schuyler Thibodaux when the present parish of the same name was being carved out of the larger Lafourche territory.

For generations, Bayou Lafourche and the highways that parallel it on either side have served as a long “main street,” stretching from one end of the parish to the other, with population, business and industry clustered close by. This land-use pattern is essential for the region, built from millennia of flood-borne silt. The highest land is nearest the bayous, which delivered the annual layers of earth.

Highways and communities seeming to have no central bayou are deceptive. Most are on ridges

A shrimp boat plies the waters of southern Terrebonne Parish. [THE COURIER AND DAILY COMET/FILE]

whose bayous gradually filled in and disappeared naturally or, later, through agricultural practices.

Terrebonne had several bayous, smaller than Bayou Lafourche, radiating from a slightly elevated central area on which early settlers built the town of Houma. Five main bayous extend from Houma toward the Gulf, like fingers from a palm. Indian natives and the earliest settlers used these sluggish streams for transportation.

Today, modern highways follow the same ancient routes; most construction, residential and business, is along bayou corridors.

Bayous give their names to communities clinging to their banks. Someone whose mail is delivered through the Theriot post office is likely to say he lives in Dularge, one of Houma’s five bayous. The others, Terrebonne, Little Caillou, Grand Caillou, Pointe-aux-Chenes, and others not usually considered among the five, like Bayou Blue and Bayou Black, were once distributaries of the silty Mississippi, when it was still permitted to overflow naturally every spring.

Like neighboring Lafourche, all of Terrebonne was built, literally, by ages of those soupy annual Mississippi overflows, spilling through Bayou Lafourche into Bayou Terrebonne and farther into smaller bayous, sometimes covering much of the parish with several feet of muddy water.

When the waters receded, silt was left behind, and the elevation of the land beside the bayou was higher, by fractions of an inch. The largest particles settled nearest the streams, over time building sandy ridges that remain the best foundations for roads and other construction.

Older inland ridges, like Coteau and Chacahoula, have survived long after the bayous that built them largely disappeared naturally. Coteau Road and Bull Run Road, along the Chacahoula ridge, remain important highway routes. The Bourg-Larose Highway follows ancient ridges to connect Terrebonne with Lafourche.

In “good earth” Terrebonne, where elevations are rarely more than 6 feet above sea level, a ridge may be evidenced more by its sturdy sandy soil than by discernible elevation. In the 1920s, the annual delivery of silty floodwater was cut off. The Mississippi’s repeated destructive flooding of settlements and agricultural lands spurred the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to complete the levee systems that still protect south Louisiana from annual overflows.

Terrebonne and Lafourche’s bayous remain water routes to the Gulf of Mexico, with roads and and settlements as far down as the elevation permits.

But these bayous, their ridges and the human development they support are threatened by coastal erosion, the result of natural forces on wetlands which have not been nourished by natural Mississippi flooding for three-quarters of a century. And the vast freshwater marshes have been further debilitated by the entry of salt water through canals cut for oilfield access.

Newcomers alike would do well to arm themselves with local or cellphone maps and take leisurely exploratory drives into remote and threatened sections of the region. That includes places like Donner or Bowie, where cypress sawmills once roared; Chauvin, where “down the bayou” isolation kept Cajun French alive as a spoken language long after French speakers were assimilated elsewhere; and Isle de Jean Charles and Dulac, where remnants of coastal Indian populations have survived for generations. And there are also Cocodrie, Leeville and Fourchon, where the highways give way to docks and boat launches that connect fishermen, commercial and sport, to the tremendous seafood resources the area enjoys. Even locals can learn something by exploring the place we call home.