Spend decades delving into the history of human endeavor in the lower Mississippi River valley and you'll encounter enough colorful characters to last several lifetimes. The snippets below recall features we've written about some of the larger-than-life personalities, questionable schemes, and outright crooks that have left their mark on the region and its sense of itself. Whether each qualifies as sinner or saint, we leave you to decide.
Susan Hymel
Although painter Don Wright of Baton Rouge never knew George West, the preacher appears time and again in Wright’s artwork. Wright has depicted the River Preacher in more than one hundred paintings.
“The River Preacher”: Susan Hymel, October 2004
If you can’t get to the River Jordan, make use of the Mississippi; “River Preacher” George West did just that in over twenty years preaching and baptizing along Big Muddy, particularly at the Baton Rouge ferry terminal.
“Dressed in a white gown with a beakless cap, George carried a white, cloth-wrapped cross. He told his family he had been up and down the Mississippi and across the country. He told them he had baptized in forty or so states, and along the Mississippi, from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico. George had gone where he thought the Lord was leading him to preach and to baptize in the rivers. He called himself ‘the Messiah of Jesus.’” Read the full story here.
“‘Coozan Dud’ and the Hadacol Boogie”: Jeremy Alford, October 2006
State Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc felt great because of his patented tonic—as well he might, given both the millions of profits it raked in for a few years and its 12% alcohol content.
"Health, many have professed, is the open-sesame to the sucker’s wallet. Dudley J. LeBlanc, Acadiana’s favorite son who died 35 years ago this month, knew the maxim all too well. He was the Cajun Renaissance man who invented—or stole, rather, from his physician—a miracle drug dubiously named Hadacol. Far from the reach of the modern-day Food and Drug Administration, LeBlanc mixed the B-vitamin tonic with boat oars behind his barn in Abbeville. Once bottled and marketed to the masses, it became a national phenomenon overnight and, by 1950, was making more money than Bayer Aspirin." Read the full story here.
“It’s All In Your Head”: Shane Alan Noecker, October 2009
Palmistry and tarot cards are for dilettantes: the true visionary will fondle your cranium. No one was safe from the itinerant phrenologists crisscrossing Louisiana and Mississippi in the 1830s. Even John James Audubon had his turn.
“The man calls to you. He asks how far to town, but before you can answer, he says, oddly, that you have a finely shaped head. He tells you he can read your head. Scientifically. He can tell you what your strengths are—what sort of work you’re best suited for, what sort of person you should marry. In other words, your destiny.
“Only a dollar, he says.”
“Moonshine Madness”: Lucile Bayon Hume, February, 2004
To the enterprising mind, liquor control laws are nothing more than a thrown-down gauntlet. Lucile explores the scofflaw tradition.
“For those untainted by moonshine or the bootlegging subculture, a moonshiner makes illegal whiskey (a.k.a. corn liquor, squeezin’s, white lightnin’, rotgut, panther’s breath, mountain dew, ‘splo, and other metaphoric names.) Brewing and distilling takes place covertly by the light of the silvery moon, glittering merrily off copper tubing used in the process. Read the full story here.
Courtesy of Al Bohl
Partly filmed in Morgan City, the 1917 feature Tarzan of the Apes was among the first movies ever to gross more than a million dollars at the box office.
“Doubling Up”: Jeremy Alford, November 2009
Exoticism is relative, and the Spanish moss, gators, and plentiful standing water we take for granted makes Louisiana seem like another world to outsiders. So when cinematographers need just that otherworldliness, here they come.
“It’s that proverbial movie magic we hear so much about; it’s the ability to visually transform a place you’ve seen countless times in the flesh, but recognize it as something and somewhere else as you sit in the darkness of a theater or your living room.
Nowhere else is this better exemplified than in the 1917 version of Tarzan of the Apes, which was partly filmed in Morgan City. It was a watershed moment not only for the Louisiana film industry, but also for national cinema, as this Tarzan feature was among the first movies ever to gross more than a million dollars at the box office. The Atchafalaya swamp served as Tarzan’s jungle and more than three hundred locals were hired on as extras—read: cannibals—for a daily rate of $1.75 each.” Read the full story here.
“Perfectly Good Reasons”: Chris Turner-Neal, February 2017
Many Southerners have a few skeletons in our closets. Most of us know which relative put them there, and will tell the story in a tone not unlike boasting after a couple of glasses of a favored tipple.
“My mother’s family had an outlaw. Stories about him varied depending on who was telling them and how intent that person was on preserving our collective respectability, but they all agreed on two points: he had actually escaped from prison using a file baked into a cake, and he had a perfectly good reason for his crimes. He was not a criminal, he was an outlaw. This distinction is an important one, and one of the most thought-provoking points raised in Keagan LeJeune’s collection of historical case studies, Legendary Louisiana Outlaws.” Read the full story here.
“Society for the Preservation and Maintenance of Aged Monarchs”: Courtney Taylor, March 1999
Two or more queen bees in a hive will sting each other to death. Two or more queen bees in a city like Natchez will form a society.
“Pilgrimage queens are elected by the club’s board of directors in honor of one’s mother and how much she has contributed to her club. (It doesn’t hurt if you have a mother or a grandmother on the board, either.) Beauty is not a prerequisite. Neither is talent, nor charm. These attributes are, of course, understood—we are from Natchez, after all. We are a group of unwitting ex-royals of all types with one thing in common. We have all marched around the floor of the city auditorium wearing a sixty-pound beaded satin and lace hoop skirt and train, gracefully waving a scepter at an audience of twelve hundred pairs of bifocals—five nights a week for at least two weeks. Tipsy or stone-cold sober, we had fun.” Read the full story here.
“Good Times with Bad Girls”: Chris Turner-Neal, July 2017
Legends often far outlive the true events that inspire them; in some corner of the American mind, New Orleans' Storyville still stands—even if its residents earned their notoriety in other positions.
“Like the Old South, the Wild West, and the general idea of “hippies,” Storyville, the fabled red-light district of New Orleans, has endured in legend far longer than it did on Earth. The fancy girls danced, among other things, in the notorious red-light district for only twenty years before being shut down in 1917—the United States was entering World War I and needed its navy to be free of distraction. Most of the structures of Storyville were demolished to make way for the Iberville Projects, themselves now gone, and only a few buildings and relics survive of the neighborhood that truly lived up to the old phrase, ‘the glamor of sin.’ Among the most beguiling traces left of Storyville are the ‘blue books,’ winking, swaggering guides to the 'better establishments' of that neighborhood, which in many cases contained extensive lists of individual local prostitutes.” Read the full story here.
“The Blue, the Gray, and the Very Green”: C. E. Richard, January 2004
If fighting the Civil War had been as much fun as pretending to fight it, Grant might still be outside Vicksburg, talking his men into one more cannonade before lights-out.
“Typical of most combat situations, my orders were simple yet vague: stand next to the forward artillery piece, and when the guys in blue uniforms emerge from the tree line, beat a hasty retreat. Run away. Right. I could do that.
“I stood alone in the middle of a vast grassy field roughly the size of Rhode Island, wearing the uniform of a Confederate private, and waited. Acres away from anyone else, I leaned against the big brass cannon, unsure of what, exactly, I was supposed to be doing. Hurry up and wait, I thought, shivering in the December wind. There are some things about the Army that never change, not matter what war you’re fighting.” Read the full story here.
