Getting the good times going

Louisiana has been the place to party on Mardi Gras since the first Europeans got here. On March 3, 1699, about 60 miles south of what is today New Orleans, Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville and a shipload of Frenchmen and Canadians pulled up to the marshy coastline, looking for a likely place to begin the colonization of Louisiana.

The mud and marsh grass did not hold much promise, but Iberville decided to celebrate anyway. He'd consulted his calendar and discovered that it was Mardi Gras day. He named his landing spot Pointe du Mardi Gras and the marshy body of water behind it was named Bayou du Mardi Gras.

There is no record of anyone throwing any beads or doubloons, or a mad horseback ride through the countryside on that day. All of that would come later. There could have been a keg of wine involved -- after all, they were Frenchmen.

The first written reference to Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans is in a report by the Spanish government in 1781. It seems that there was some problem with crowd control. Masked balls had become common when France ruled colonial Louisiana, but Spain tried to discourage masking after it took over the state in 1762. It seems the French aristocrats in New Orleans, who did not like their new Spanish overlords, used their masks to mock and ridicule Spanish officials.

The attempt to ban masking continued after the Louisiana Purchase. Under American rule, all masked entertainment was banned in New Orleans. Those early Americans disliked what they considered Creole "wickedness," and tried to suppress Carnival in the city.

Commerce had as much to do with it as conviviality did in bringing Carnival to the countryside.  Merchants in south Louisiana cities complained that steamboat (and, later, rail) excursions to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras celebration deprived them of business.

The late Glen Conrad noted in a history of New Iberia, for example, "Beginning in the mid-1870s, hundreds of ... residents made an annual pilgrimage to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and ... merchants loudly lamented the fact that large sums of money were being spent in the Crescent City."

But most of the first attempts to keep folks at home were apparently not well received. Revelers still left smaller towns by the hundreds to celebrate Carnival in the big city.

In 1869, "the old grown young and the merry young" did stay at home in Lafayette to attend a ball that was "a whirl of pleasure and gaiety." Visitors from St. Martin Parish "threw ... bright stars into the constellation of that night," according to a newspaper account.

Friends from St. Landry Parish had also been invited to the celebration, but most of them stayed at home, and were not among the "chivalric manhood ... [who] met with as bright smiles as ever ... rewarded [young knights]" or the "lovers wooing souls" that "basked in the sunshine of beauty's eye."

That seemed to be a trend in the early days in St. Landry. In 1873, the Opelousas Courier complained, "Had it not been for the impromptu turnout of about a dozen maskers--mostly small boys--Tuesday evening, we might never have known that Mardi Gras had reached as far as Opelousas. ... Not even a ball or a party could be gotten up to relieve the dull monotony of the season."

Hoping to salvage the situation, the Courier urged, "Can't the Fire Department ... take hold of the matter, and get up a ball, party, or 'shindig' of some description for St. Joseph's day? Who'll start the enterprise?  Don't all speak at once."

 

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You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589