Cattle Tales

By: TONY MARKS
Associate Editor

An educator who taught social sciences at Sacred Heart for 23-years penned a book recently that aims to preseve much of the local Acadian culture that was lost as the Germans and Americans began to move into the area.
Dr. Christopher Fontenot’s book titled Acadian Prairie-Theodule is the first in a series of books that follows four families from the time of the Texas Revolt from 1835 - 1836 to the time four students left high school in 1969. The four families throughout the series are the Dupres, Fruges, Ortegos, and Nightflowers.
“When I was 12-years-old, we left Ville Platte and went to the country,” he said. “I didn’t know too many people where we moved, so I had a lot of time on my hands. I started writing stories.”
He wrote such stories throughout his time at Sacred Heart where he graduated in 1969. Upon leaving the Halls of Troy, he spent time at LSU-E before going to LSU for a degree in history. After getting another degree in education, he taught in Port Allen before returning to his alma mater where he taught until 2000.
That year he went to teach in Baton Rouge and decided to pursue his doctorate at LSU. “I had to step back from (teaching) full-time to part-time so I could finish my doctorate, and they never put me back up to full-time again,” he explained. “So I had time on my hands again.”
Fontenot spent much of this time at a coffee shop in Baton Rouge that became familiar to him while he was writing his dissertation. While there he began to again write stories. “I had written stories about kids at Sacred Heart,” he said. “I was following the same four kids through high school, and I went to The Gazette and asked them if they had some old copies of the newspaper, and they sent me to the library where they had it on Microfilm. I began to do research and began to incorporate the things that happened here in town into the story following the same four kids.”
Acadian Prairie-Theodule was written after the last volume of the series and was inspired by a book written about Belaire Cove. “I realized that I didn’t have to stick to just what happened that I remember personally,” he said. “I could go back and get family lore and family history. This story takes some of the history of the region from the 1830s to 1867, and I got the same four families. It all connects.”
The first in the series revolves around four families who live in the area of Faquetaique, which is now known as Chataignier. It is a story of their perseverance during tough times as it opens with a family member going to Texas and dying for independence. According to Fontenot, the story goes from there “to just before the Civil War.”
“There was a Vigilante Movement,” he said. “It happened here in Acadiana when certain cattle thieves began to be so bold that they would operate in day light, and that when they were caught they would be brought to Opelousas where they would bribe juries to vote not guilty and get off and then go back and do the same thing.”
“So the Vigilante Movement,” he continued “was organized by local people to fight against that, and it was known as The Anti-Vigilante War. There was actually a battle that was fought in present day Rayne where they brought a canon out and crushed the thieves, and something like 80 people were hanged.”
The Civil War began the next year, and Fontenot explained how it brought additional suffering in the area. “They had Union Cavalry raids during the battle that eventually became Pleasant Hill on the way to Shreveport,” he said. “They came down to Opelousas. They raided the place, they burned some buildings out, they basically tore up a bunch of farms, barns, and things like that.”
“I was describing a lot of the stress that they had,” Fontenot continued. “The people in the area had to duck the Union Cavalry, and they had to duck their own cavalry because they were basically kidnapping people and forcing them to join the army.”
The book Acadian Prairie-Theodule concludes with people in the area persevering during the tough times that followed the war. “Life was hard,” Fontenot stated. “When the Civil War ended, it was bad enough that a lot of people were missing because they were trying to find their way home from the army when they were finally released.”
“They had to go through famine;” he continued “they had to go through fevers. The Spring of 1865 was very wet, so the crops failed. The following year it was wet again. Army caterpillars destroyed their cotton crop. Corn didn’t come out. People were on the edge of starvation, and then there were raids by these Jayhawkers who were just basically thieves and cashing in on the chaos of the time.”
Although the story is fictional, Fontenot hopes people who read this book will come away from it learning something about the historical setting of it. “I didn’t know that we had this great Vigilante Movement that involved hundreds of people in the area, and maybe if you read this you’ll learn some of that history,” he said. “I always enjoyed reading, so I thought maybe I could write about something that maybe I would have wanted to read myself.”
Acadian Prairie-Theodule, according to Fontenot, can be purchased from him for $35.00, online at amazon.com. or at Barnes and Nobles book stores. Copies are also available at the RoseDog Publishing online bookstore.