Cheniere Caminada's "Great October Storm"

"The settlement of Cheniere Caminada has been swept out of existence."

—The Thibodaux Sentinel, Saturday, October 7, 1893

Over a century ago, an unnamed Category 4 hurricane made landfall at Cheniere Caminada, a peninsula just west of Grand Isle on the Louisiana coast. It turned out to be a surprise killer; over the course of one terrible week, it flooded much of Southeast Louisiana and claimed two thousand lives from Caminada to Alabama, earning it a spot as one of America’s most deadly natural disasters, a distinction it retains to this day. Nearly eight hundred of those two thousand lives were taken on Cheniere Caminada, a peninsular fishing village of about 1500 people. 

By the record, 779 people died at Cheniere Caminada on the evening of the hurricane’s landing, many of them children, either drowned in the sixteen-foot storm surge that engulfed the island or crushed by the roofs of their homes while seeking shelter. By the time the storm let up, over half of the cheniere’s population was dead or swept out to sea, left to thrash in the violence of nature. Despite a few earnest attempts to rebuild, the area never recovered.

Nineteenth-century Caminada residents lived in communion with the Gulf of Mexico, so they were no strangers to coastal storms. Ten recorded hurricanes blew ashore near Caminada between 1831 and 1893, and all were predicted by fishermen and oystermen who knew the ways of the waves. The hurricane that destroyed their lives, however, came largely unpredicted.

A Lost Way of Life

In 1893, Cheniere Caminada was inhabited by fishermen, oystermen, and families with lots and lots of children; it was a vibrant community of devout Catholics who attended Thursday and Saturday dances as religiously as they attended Sunday Mass. They were Creoles from New Orleans; they were Acadians from Lafourche Parish; they were Italian immigrants and displaced Germans and Prussians. There were many non-Acadian French and people of Spanish descent, too.  As coastal communities often are, Cheniere Caminada was geographically isolated, and nobody disputed the widespread use of French as the common language.

The people of Cheniere Caminada were faithful to their Catholic priest missionary, Fr. Gaston d’Espinosa who, from 1883 to 1889, facilitated the construction of a church, and eventually a proper religious organization, both for Caminada and a handful of surrounding islands. The church became Notre Dame du Lourdes, Our Lady of Lourdes. During his tenure, he managed to sway a few parishioners from attending the weekly dances; but by and large, most danced on anyway. It was the expression of the community’s joie de vivre, and Fr. Espinosa’s successor, Fr. Ferdinand Grimeau, noted as much.

Unlike the seasonal populations of its vacationer-island neighbor, most of the people of Cheniere Caminada were full-time residents. Their cheniere—Louisiana French for “oak ridge”—was substantial enough to support the growth of oak trees, and the warm Gulf waters provided more than enough seafood to create profitable livings for many people. Caminadaville, as the settlement came to be called, saw its population double in the late nineteenth century. By the beginning of 1893, the community had just minted a brand new schoolhouse and had recently acquired its own post office; and innovations in the oyster trade began to generate great economic growth. 

The Wind of Death

Late in the afternoon, on October 1, 1893, Cheniere residents noticed something amiss. “But look—the birds, the seagulls, the pelicans—yes, even the man-o-war birds,” cried Ernest Gaspard, in a document compiled by Arthur W. Van Pelt fifty years after the hurricane. “Look, they come inland; they leave the sea. And the cattle—see them. They, too, come in from the marshes.”

In the days after the hurricane, journalist Rose C. Falls collected and compiled survivors’ accounts and published them under the title Cheniere Caminada, Or, The Wind of Death: The Story of the Storm in Louisiana, now on file at the Library of Congress. Within the first few pages, Fr. Grimeau gives a visceral firsthand account, describing houses being demolished and carried away entirely by six- to eight-foot waves, among other grim sights.

“I was in the upper story of the presbytery, holding on to the sill of an open window, powerless to do anything and exposed to the terrific blasts and hearing the cries of agony of my poor dying parishioners. [...] Then I ... offered a fervent prayer to the Father of all and begged of him to be merciful in his judgment on the souls of so many of his children who were, at that moment, dying in such a sudden and terrible manner.”

The Wind of Death also offers up the mysterious tale of Andre Guilbaux, who invited his comrades to his home for dinner that Sunday night. After dinner, he stood up, glass of wine in hand, and proclaimed the purpose of the evening: “Friends, I fear that this is the last time we shall all be together. I feel that the storm and the wind and the waves tonight will take me away with them. I shall not go alone, either.” There are at least two accounts of Guilbaux’s actions that night, and one claims that he then pointed out those at his table whose lives would be taken. By that account—told by Guilbaux’s brother, who survived—he predicted those deaths correctly, including his own. 

Dr. John Doucet, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and professor of biology at Nicholls State University, grew up in Golden Meadow. His ancestors survived the hurricane—and technically, his great-great-grandfather John Frederique Rebstock, an oysterman, is the reason that sixty-two others kept their lives that night. “His legend in the hurricane is that he had a large house on the coast,” Doucet said. “The tidal wave collapsed the cubical part of his house, and the triangular roof fell and got washed up onto the highland of the cheniere. Sixty-two people survived under his roof during the hurricane.” (Doucet credits this legend to a historical illustration of Mr. Rebstock’s roof that appeared in the Times-Democrat on October 6, 1893.)

Doucet has a few theories as to why so many were caught off-guard that night and why Grand Isle, which was then literally within spitting distance from Caminada, wasn’t hit as hard. “This was a cheniere, an oak forest, on two to four feet of high land on the coast,” Doucet explained. “But when the villagers made their fantastic little village, they cut down all the trees.” Grand Isle’s trees were left standing, which afforded more protection from wind and storm surge, though the island did incur some casualties and destruction. “That’s what we think,” Doucet added.

Doucet speaks often and highly of Caminada’s early meteorological methods, but the question remains: Why did they not see the telltale signs of a massive hurricane until it was upon them? Years ago, Doucet spoke with New Orleans meteorologist Nash Roberts about the storm, and it turns out that the usual seafaring types who would’ve diagnosed the weather that day may have been fooled by a retreating cold front. “Nash said the storm clipped the Yucatán Peninsula, and then it got sucked up by a low-pressure trough, pushed by a cold front over Cheniere Caminada,” Doucet said. “This [cold front] was apparently weak and retreating on October 1; and it sucked the hurricane up, turned it from going into Mexico, and dragged it right over the Louisiana coast. So it was coming at an angle and at a speed that probably no one was able to recognize it during daylight hours.” And of course, the hurricane showed up at night.

More insight comes from Doucet’s research into the hurricanes Caminada survived prior to the “big one.” None of them were direct hits, and the later ones may not have been full-fledged hurricanes. As a result, he said, “there might have been at least a generation there, maybe more” that hadn’t experienced a real hurricane at Caminada.

For the 1993 centennial, Dr. Doucet was asked to write a play about the night of the storm, which he called Tant Que Durera la Terre (As Long As the Earth Lasts). In the play, Doucet explores this generational knowledge gap by designating a single character—Grand Pére, an old man—as the personification of the old ways of diagnosing weather by natural observation. Grand Pére has a lot to say—in fact, he tries to teach the younger ones how to predict the weather; but no one in the play seems to have the time to listen. 

Diaspora

In 1993, Windell Curole, along with Dr. Doucet, Robert B. Looper, and Colley Charpentier, pulled together collected documents to publish a commemorative book about Cheniere Caminada and its fate, partially because no such official collection of information about the storm existed. The group did the hard work of compiling names of hurricane survivors and tracking down their descendants.

As the commemorative book explains, Doucet’s ancestors, along with many other survivors, left the ruins of Caminada and relocated to what’s now Golden Meadow, Côte Blanche, Larose, Leeville, Cut Off, Galliano, Westwego, areas along the rim of Barataria Bay, and the west bank of Jefferson Parish. Some of these towns were even founded by Caminada survivors; other areas experienced a population boom after the storm, such as Salaville (now Westwego). Streets and people in some of these areas still bear the survivors’ last names: Terrebonne, Cheramie, Curole, Pitre, Rebstock, Lefort, Lefont, Adams, Perrin, Valence, Alario.

In many cases, those who remained near the coast were able to continue their sea-based livelihoods, and many of their descendants still do. But Cheniere Caminada itself is barely more than a smattering of fishing camps and bait shops that rush past in a blur through the car window as you approach the Grand Isle bridge. On closer inspection, a sign of the community does exist: there’s a cemetery right before the bridge, believed to house the mass grave in which the hurricane victims were buried. 

On October 1, 1993, the descendants of the Caminada hurricane survivors gathered at that cemetery. Many had never met before, but they found themselves shedding tears over the same graves and sharing similar stories about that horrible night one hundred years before, told to them by grandparents and great-grandparents. What the hurricane had blown apart, they had managed to put back together—just not in the same form. At the very least, they all knew where they’d come from.  

Chopin's Elegy

The Caminada hurricane had a great impact on author Kate Chopin, who spent summers at Grand Isle with her children and often attended Mass at Cheniere Caminada. Displaced descendants can find a fictionalization of their roots in the setting of Chopin’s second novel, The Awakening, which is, not coincidentally, set in neighboring Grand Isle one year before the storm destroyed Caminada.

Chopin wrote a short story, At Cheniere Caminada, over a three-day period in late October 1893, as news of the hurricane’s devastation hit national presses. Six years later, she wrote The Awakening. The hurricane is never mentioned in either story but is present in context—the novel was a commentary on social constraints on women at the time, but as LSU Professor Emily Toth once noted, it was also “an elegy for a lost way of life.”