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Flying across prairies tremblante

Jim Bradshaw

Jim Bradshaw
jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com

After the annexation of Texas into the United States in 1845, some New Orleans businessmen, among them G.W.B. Bayley and Col. James E. Gibbs, decided there was money to be made from a railroad running west from New Orleans.
Large cattle ranches were strung across the prairie from Vermilionville (now Lafayette) to the Sabine River and the businessmen thought rails were just the thing needed to bring that beef to New Orleans markets. They also saw profit potential in the big stands of cypress that grew along the route, especially in Terrebonne and St. Mary parishes.
They wanted to build a railroad across south Louisiana to Brashear City (as Morgan City was then known), then up the Teche, through Vermilionville, then north to Opelousas and
Alexandria. From there, the rails would turn west, cross the Sabine River at a place called Thompson’s Bluff, which I can’t find on any of my old maps, then travel across Texas to El Paso and from there to Mazatlán on the Pacific coast of Mexico.
An 1851 newspaper account quoted Col. Buckner Payne, a civil engineer, who said in New Orleans that he was astonished “that so beautiful and fertile a country as found in the Attakapas District was so unknown.” The reason for that, he said, was “the fact of its being completely cut off from direct communication with the Mississippi River and New Orleans by swamps, trembling prairies, lakes, and tortuous bayous.”
Col. Payne said he could build the railroad for $10,000 per mile.
One of the men who heard that estimate was Alexandre Mouton of Vermilionville, former governor and senator, who helped to raise the money and promote the cause.
Construction for the New Orleans, Opelousas & Great Western Railroad began in October 1852, starting from Algiers on the west bank of the Mississippi River, even though skeptics feared that tracks, train and passengers would sink into the swamps under their own weight if a train ever tried to run the route.
A yellow fever epidemic stopped construction in 1853 with barely 20 miles of track completed. The project was also way over budget. Backers found more money and the work went on. In November 1854, the rails reached Bayou Lafourche, 52 miles from Algiers.
But the worst was yet to come. More than 700 men worked during the hot, humid summer of 1855 building roadbed and laying track across 12 miles of the Chacahoula Swamp in Terrebonne Parish, working in mud up to their waists. Heat, malaria, and bad drinking water laid them low in droves but the work went on. By 1857 the line had been built to Berwick Bay, l00 miles west of New Orleans. Its construction was hailed as one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century.
The railroad builders didn’t have the money to continue building from there, and then the Civil War erupted and much of the line that had been built was destroyed or badly damaged. Thirty years passed before the line finally reached Texas. But even so, that stretch of track across the swamp was something to brag about.
Bayley wrote several years after that work was done, “Those who now cross these swamps ... in luxurious coaches, flying at the rate of thirty or forty miles per hour, do not think of the hardships and the trials of the locating and construction engineer and others who led the way through the wilderness. ... He who had charge of the location of this road enjoys the luxury of a ride in the cars when he recalls the old time and thinks of how he waded through these swamps and prairies tremblante, and swam the bayous, amid mosquitoes, snakes and alligators, whose domain had seldom, if ever before, been invaded.”

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.

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