July 2, 2025 • 47 mins
In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, we are looking into the actual events of the April 12, 1926, one-day Trappers' War in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana where mercenaries hired by Judge Leander Perez mounted a machine gun on a boat and attempted to kill the Islenos trappers on Delacroix Island. We will also look deeper into the life of Leander Perez while asking why so many corrupt leaders have come out of this region of the country.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
The stretch that the fought. The battle was taken is
by a mile. So the boat was going and they
was with the machine gun and the people from Delhiphot
were shooting over the level, you know, just shooting the
shot gun, the rifles whatever they had. Yeah, a lot
of them with bird shot, lot on wood buckshot would
kill the machine gun man. I don't know. I guess
(00:28):
just just shot them up with the way I understand.
The mortar was all shot up the boat. The cabin
on the boat was all shot up with bullet holes.
I guess that's what I could see, you know.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
On this episode, we're getting into the nitty gritty details
of the November nineteen twenty six one day. It is
Laanio's Trappers War in South Louisiana over muskrat trapping rights.
We'll hear from two men whose fathers were involved in
the war. But a bigger question to me is why
(01:01):
is this region of the country known for producing corrupt leaders?
And is that even a fair question? This is a
look into human nature when it's corrupted by power and muskrats.
I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one.
And for anyone new to the bear Grease Feed. We
(01:21):
have multiple podcasts on this feed, bear Grease, The Render,
Brent's Country Life and Lake Pickles Backwoods University. The complexity
can be daunting, but the good times just keep rolling.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. My name is klay
(01:50):
Nukem and this is the bear Grease Podcast where we'll
explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely
places and where will tell the story of Americans who
lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f
HF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear
(02:12):
as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore.
We established in the last episode the culture of the
Islamios trappers camps on Delacroix Island in Louisiana in the
nineteen twenties and how muskrat soared in value, making formerly
(02:37):
almost worthless swampland extremely valuable. This is Placamine Parish's Paul Legard.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
In those days, there wasn't no you owned this piece
of land, and now the guy I owned up. It
was all opened priory. It was just like Wild West.
And when you know when a story at the beginning
of the season, you went out Dan, you picked out
spot and you put your trap on out and people
honored each other's areas. You know. You said. That went
(03:08):
on for a few years, and the politicians got involved
with it, but what they wanted to do was take
a percentage away from each trapper, and they wouldn't go
for it. People have been trapping at Landfa at that
time almost one hundred and fifty years, you know, and
(03:31):
now they had camps. People used to build camps in
the priory for they could. The whole family went out
there and uh in some cases, and they spent the winter,
you know, trapping, and the women were cooking to take
care of as far as the men we're in up
properly working well. They pushed them on those camps and
(03:55):
they brought in trappers from West Louisiana are Texas. They
brought in own trappers and put them into camps.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
What Paul is calling the prairie is what I understand
to be Swampland the people who had trapped here for
one hundred and fifty years were getting pushed out by
the politicians bringing in trappers from the outside. They'd been
double crossed by one of their own, a man named
Leander Perez, who had become the chairman of the Trappers Association.
(04:28):
He was also a judge in Plaquemine Parish. But when
he saw an opportunity to make a bunch of money,
he pushed out his own people and brought in new
trappers that played by his rules, paid more money for
the trapping leases, and sold the furs to him. The
Islanos were not gonna take this from Perez. Here's what
(04:49):
they did to the new trappers that were now in
their old camps.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
My grandfather told them that those camps were not but
more or less a platform. They build a big platform
and they put a top paper shack around it, and
he said they they're waiting a gang of fellas, not
one guy, but a bunch of fellaws. Would wait until
(05:16):
say ten o'clock in the morning, when all the men
were out in the in the prairie trapping, and they
go and they take tell them, women, take all your
stuff and make it. They told us they didn't try
to hurt those people because they were working people, just
like they were. They make them take everything out the camp,
their supplies, their beds there, whatever they had, and they
(05:37):
you know, they had fifteen twenty guys. They picked that camp.
I'm trying to buy the whole camp. We're going to
buy you. So when that happened, they brought into Texas
Rangers to protect them, and uh, that's when the real
trouble started.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
The real trouble started as Perez hired mercenaries to kill
and intimidate the eslonos. I'm trying to make sense of
how trapping muskrats could bring a community to bloodshed. We're
not talking about gold or black dirt, farmland or oil,
but a rat. We've been backed into a corner here, folks,
(06:15):
We've got to talk just a little bit about muskrats.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
My name is Martin Cooker.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
I work for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fishers in
Parks and I currently serve as the Nuisance Species program
Bologist and also the Furbearer Program Bologist.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
This guy is a muskrat expert.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
A rare breed, but the muskrat is in the rodent family,
native to the US and Canada. In the US, it
has at least fourteen different subspecies Virginia, Rocky Mountain, the
Oregon Coast, Nevada, the Great Plains, So there are subspecies
really depending on location, they're going to be about nine
(06:54):
fourteen inches long with a with a tail anywhere from
seven to twelve inches, so you're talking about twenty four
twenty six inches head to the end of the tail.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
They're going to weigh.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Anywhere from like a pounds and a half to four
and a half pounds. Muskrats weren't really seeing that much
in Louisiana until like the late eighteen hundreds, especially like
in the coastal parishes. One of the things that they
put forth is that the decline in alligators due to
hunting and with the burning of the marshes to locate
(07:24):
the alligators, and also with the reduction in minx, all
were linked to the muskrat increase. Now, after that the
predators were gone away, the habitat's gone up, and then
the mush rats appeared in the millions. It was just
like a population explosion. It was an article in the
(07:44):
nineteen oh two in the New York Times. The headline
was the muskrat is the principal fur producer in America.
There was a quote from the I think the Fort
Worth Star in nineteen oh eight in this stated that
Louisiana has the largest fur trade in the world, all right,
And that now that is verifiable if you go back
and look at the records in Louisiana was the fur
(08:06):
trapping capital of the US fourth it was more first
coming from Louisiana anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
The muskrat trade peaked around nineteen twenty five, when they
were worth a dollar thirty each and a good trapper
could catch as many as one hundred and fifty day,
yielding thousands of dollars during the seventy five day season,
and several millions of dollars worth of muskrat firs were
flowing through Placamine Parish alone. I could see Steve Ranella
(08:32):
wanting to get in on that. Here is Wimpy Serenae.
He's eighty four years old and was raised on Delacroix
Island in the trapping camps. He's going to take us
right into the One Day War.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
What happened with Perez in that it was long before parting,
you know, get out, but uh, Perez gathered up cagunes
from the west part of Louisiana, Texans gunslingers at that time,
it was really gun slingers, and he formed like a
(09:13):
little army. He monitored a machine gun on oyster board.
I think it was either boat. You know. What happened
before they attacked the people from Dinna crew found out
about it, that they were planning this thing. Matter of fact,
my dad used to have relatives in what they called
(09:33):
Kinnharven and uh, these Texans and that was hanging around
the ballrooms there, you know, and you heard overheard them saying,
we're gonna make some Spanish shop. Body these jokes down here,
you know. Yeah, so they found out about that day.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Who was your dad involved in finding out about it?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, he found out about it, and I guess other
people did too, because they had relatives in Knoven And
this is what these guys used to hang on when
they was starting to get together, you know, and going
to barrooms in that and I guess they talked and
sort of people from Della Cruill find out that they
will come in.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
After almost one hundred years, the people from Delacroix Island
still recalled the words that started this war and maybe
saved their lives. They overheard someone saying that they were
going to make some Spanish soup. And if you remember,
the Islanios were originally from the Canary islands off the
coast of Spain. So this region, this island, they spoke Spanish.
(10:38):
Here's filmmaker David Dubos who made the film Delta Justice,
the Islanios trappers.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
War word filtered down from They got into a bar
not too far from where the Islanians were, and it
was literally just guys bragging in a bar that they
were going to go down to Ela Crow and make
Spanish soup out of the Islanios and just loud, drunken
(11:06):
stupidity and arrogance, and was overheard. And they went back
and told them what was happening, and you know that
was it.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
So this this gunboat with these Texas Rangers, this machine
gun mounted on the boat come down, comes down the bayou.
There's a levee, yeah, which is like a damn that's
keeping the bayou from going into the onto the land.
And behind the levee is the Islanio's houses.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Author Glenn Jeanson estimated there to be four hundred armed
Islanios on the levee waiting on this gun boat when
it arrived. The machine gun was essentially a gatling gun
like on a World War two boat, and the captain
of the boat was J. H Asher, a former Texas
ranger from Dallas. They had no idea they were going
(11:55):
to be met with resistance. They thought they were just
going to take the boat down the bayou and just
splattered the Islaono's camps with rounds from that machine gun.
Who knew these people were so passionate about muskrats.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
And the way I understand it, they moneled the machine
gun on the boat, and so they monited and they
came up what they called gentility. It was, you know,
the island, like I said, with the with the machine
gun and all of the Texans in that. But the
people from down there was ready. So they got their
shot gun. There was a levee whe whether if you
(12:33):
go down there, you can see the road is on
the levee the highway, and it was a higher levee
than what it is today because everything's singing, but anyway,
it was much higher. So they got behind the limit
with the shot and guns and whatever guns that they had,
and when they made the turn into the Bayer Terra
buff you know, they started with the machine gun, but
(12:56):
they also went I got back up a little bit.
It took the machine gun the night before and set
it to shoot over the levee, over the bank, you know,
to buying the bank. But what happened when they attacked
the next morning, the tide went down.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
So they had to fix the machine gun, but it
couldn't reach the Islanios because.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
They couldn't angle upwards correct.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
So they were kind of stuck.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
You know.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
They tried to get it up and hang it up,
but that those things were enormously heavy. And then you're
in the line of fire too.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
You have to remember that. So so when they couldn't
adjust it, that machine gun like the dude and did
it kind of so when they would shoot, it was
hitting the levee instead of hitting the people because the
tide went down, and so they would hit the bank. So,
you know, they didn't the machine gun didn't do them
(13:58):
too much good. And of Coastal had the other people
with their pistols and guns and what have you, and
they started that they wore right there and they they
shot up the the machine gun boat. They killed the
the only one was killed, the gun, the guy that
was running the machine gun boat. You know, quite a
(14:20):
few guns, quite a few guns.
Speaker 5 (14:22):
Well.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
The stretch that the fought the battle was taken is
about let's see, about a mile, so you know where
where the battle took place, where they was at, where
they were.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Set shooting that whole mile down the canal this gun ship.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
As to what our vision, the boat was going, and
they was with the machine gun and the people from
Delapert were shooting over the level, you know, just shooting.
They shot guns and rifles whatever they had. Yeah, you know,
because a lot of them had just shotguns, you know,
a lot of them with bird shot, a lot of
them with buckshot, you know, and would killed the machine
(15:01):
gun man.
Speaker 5 (15:02):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
I guess just just shot them up with the way
I understand that the mortar was all shot up the boat.
The cabin on the boat was all shining up with
bullet holes. I guess that's what I could see.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, the man who was killed, Sam Galland, was reported
by the coroner they had seventeen bullet holes in his body.
Speaker 5 (15:27):
But these leios had, you know, the trajectory sort of
like a forty five degree trajectory angle on that boat
where they could just fire away. And yeah, they wounded
several of them and killed one. But yeah, that's like
you're literally walking into a I mean, I don't know
(15:47):
what you would call them. In the military. Sometimes in
these wars, they you know, you get trapped like that,
you're just you just just no way out.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
So you have studied about this and talked to all
these different people, who do you think fired the first shot?
Speaker 5 (16:02):
Probably the Islanios. Probably they weren't gonna sit there and
let them fire a machine gun at him.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
One, only one person was killed, one Texas ranger whose
last name was Gowland, Sam Gowland. He was the one
operating the machine gun. The other ones were driven away
and they went looking for Perez. They were going to
kill him. That's how angry they were, as you can imagine.
And Perez escaped and managed to get out of town
(16:33):
literally by getting over into New Orleans and getting out
of the parish.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Was Perez wasn't on the boat though.
Speaker 5 (16:42):
No, he was not, of course not. No, those were
his hired guns. Literally, he was nowhere near the boat.
He's not gonna get his hands dirty, He's not going
to get shot at. And I'm sure he had people
around him protecting him.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
It was your dad.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
There was your father there.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, he was there, yea. And like I was seeing
my dad had went to something happened, and I don't
know what it was. I just told these things that
these Texans and gunsling as well. When they started getting
shot at, they started running through the march and they
shot him up, you know, but they didn't kill them all.
(17:25):
And they got all shot up, and one of them
was coming swimming across the bay. And this is when
I'm one of the incident. I was told and a
friend of my dad they said, look, that's the guy
that tried to beat you up and off in the couch.
And uh, my dad had an Elsie Smith shot double
(17:45):
shotgun and I didn't know, but he had it in
the in our attic and he never did use it.
I used to go up there and I could see
it and the stock was cracked, you know. And somebody
else told me that my dad hit that guy with
the stock of a shotgun and they broke the stock.
Oh wow, And I remember the shotgun. It was an
(18:07):
old Elsie Smith and the stock was broken.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Paul told me the same story about Whimpy's dad breaking
a gun stock off one of the boatman's heads. Here
is Paul with an unusual story of a first hand
account from a man on the boat involving a wild
coincidence with the dog and a guy named to What's
(18:34):
Yep to What's.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
I'm going to tell you another little story of cut
fits right into this. My daddy used to buy crabs
before he died. My daddy died when he was thirty
eight years old. I was fifteen fifteen is on when
he died, and we used to go to old on
Highway eleven. They had a family over there. They were
s stands. The old man was Pete and he had
(19:00):
a son that was Pete. One of them was towards
uh old man, Old Man Pete. His daddy was on
the boat when they shot it up. Like I said,
those people had no education and they looked to make
a dollar whatever they could make a dollar. And he
wasn't from Dela Crown. But they come there the trap.
(19:24):
When the trapping was good, they stayed. He said, well,
some kind of way he got mixed up and got
on that boat. He must They must have gave him
a job, that can of whatever, and he got on
that boat. And he told me, he said, when they
started shooting that boat, the cast net LEDs were bouncing off,
And I asked him, said the cast that they said, Yeah,
(19:46):
they take a cast net ledge. It's got a whole
clean through it, you know, the castle. Yeah, And they
had smashed the end of that and they put that
in the shotgun shell he said. He said, the cast
that LEDs were bouncing off. He said, But them steel jackinson,
them rifle shells was going clean through red boat. And
it wasn't no steel boat late they had. There was
a wood boat, he said. And he said, what happened,
(20:09):
he was sleeping on the other side of the motor away.
It happened early in the morning. He's sleeping on the
other side of the motor and he said, three or
four of them Texas Rangers jumped on top of him,
trying to get away from getting behind that motor you said,
getting trying to get away from there. And uh, well,
let me back up a minute. We used to go
(20:31):
over there and buy crabs. We'd buy crabs or fifty
two pounds hamp of crabs for four dollars of hamper
number ones and uh but anyway, we were over there
buying him and old man, old man Pete was there.
He had a bunch of old cars and trucks stuff.
You know junk, and they had a dog in there,
(20:53):
and that dog come out wanting to eat or something.
He told, told that dog, go let down. Dog. The
doge went it was button back and laid down. And
he told me saying, no, that dog is now I
can't remember exiety. It was sixteen at eighteen years old,
he said, I've been having that dog a long time,
the old dog. We went in the house, he told
(21:17):
told a story about that being behind that mode and
them Texas rangers and all jumping on top of him
and all. And when we come out of there to leave,
that dog was dead. I'll never forget that the dog
was laying their dead. He died. Why he told that story.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, it's odd the things you remember that seemed completely disconnected.
But I think these are mechanisms in our mind to
help us remember the important stuff. Like an eighteen year
old dog dying while the man was telling you about
being on the gun ship. That's just odds. What I'm
(22:00):
here for, Paul, good story here is wimpy. I'm trying
to understand, like how the thing could escalate to where
lander Perez was willing.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
To kill people?
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Yeah, how did that?
Speaker 1 (22:16):
How does that happen. The only thing I can understand
is that he told these guys, all these people that
he's hired, Look, uh, we have to take care of
the people at Dental Croil, and you're going to have
the all this trapping lands and you can trap it
as long as you give me a percentage of whatever
you're catching all that, and you're going to have the
land instead of instead of and we got to run
(22:38):
them all and even if we have to kill Wow.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
That was so he just had that that strong of
an iron fist. He was isolated enough down in the
deep Delta that he just thought, I can I can
do anything.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
That's why I kind of consider him a dictator. You know,
he had that Powell and he thought he can just
do anything until he faced the people from Golacron. What
about his.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Reputation here, Like if you were to go on the street,
like when we drove here, we drove down.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Perez Drive, Yeah, in the Pere Rive, well, a lot
of the politicians were with you in Saint Benod.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Perez Drive was named after Leander Perez in nineteen sixty nine,
but in the late nineteen nineties, after history had kind
of showed who this guy was and had judged him.
The name of the road was changed to be named
after a more likable judge named Melvin Perez, so it
(23:48):
remains Perez Drive. It's just a different Perez. What tell
me how your dad handled the trappers war? So he
he is actually there on the levee with a gun,
did he? He didn't view that it's like something real
honorable that he had done, like he had defended his people.
(24:12):
Or was it just kind of like something he didn't
want to talk about.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Right, He didn't talk about it too much. I guess
he felt like it was survival. He had to fight
to savive.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Like it wasn't a cool story to him, like today
it was today one hundred years later, we're like, wow.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Wow, this is what happened. Oh, it wasn't. It wasn't
no big honor or nothing like that. It was just
something that he had to do that he didn't want
to do, but he had to do it to savive.
Isn't either kill or be killed.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
It's interesting in the history because it's real easy to
like kind of glorify something good and bad one hundred
years later, and but back in the day, we might
have thought this was the least interesting thing that ever happened.
We're just like this is a bad thing, Like this
shows kind of the the evil of mankind. What what
do you think about that?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Uh? I think about what a person with power would
try to do to maintain that power. That would be
land a parath even if he had to kill to
do any he did it. That's how I look at it.
As far as a lot of people liked land in Parrett,
but I couldn't cry.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
It's it's kind of wild to think about people having
a right trying to kill each other over a muskrat, right,
you know that's today.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
You look at it, man and people killed him something
or mushkranchy a well living you know, you had to survive.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Here's a simple version of how the conflict reached its
final resolution. It involved a guy named Manuel Malaro that
was in Islanias. So the people went to Manuel Malario.
He was an educated man with money, successful, They said,
can you help us? He buys the lane?
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Right he and what does he do? He just wanted
to In other words, he was a good businessman. Also,
let's face that, you know. So what he did is
he went and where and formed Delacrat Corporation named it
after Delacrot, and he bought it, and then people would
(26:29):
trap for him because he would buy it afar. Delacro
Corporation would buy it afar. Okay, Okay, Like I said,
he's a businessman, you know, true businessman. So he buys
all this land. Okay, okay, this is the only way
I can do it. You know, I'll buy the land
we bought it from. I got it. I don't. I
wouldn't know, but I'd have to think that he had
(26:56):
to make some kind of arrangement with Leeann the Reds.
But talking to his granddaughter, they hated land the press,
you know, and I thought, wow, how can he buy
this land when out going through the dictator of Plagamin Parish.
I couldn't answer that. But he didn't buy it, and
(27:17):
then he sold it to the trappers, the people from Delacrow.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
So he sold the land back to them. He didn't
lease it to him.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
No, we could some of them. Some people didn't buy land,
but they're all. Even if you bought the land, you
had to sell you for the Delacrat Corperation.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
So Malario ended up being the good guy. The only
difference between he and Perez is that he was fair
in his dealings with the Islanos. But I think we
have got to take a closer look at Leander Perez.
He was born in eighteen ninety one and Placuamine Parish
and raised in a wealthy Catholic family. Graduated from lsu
with the Law in nineteen fourteen at the age of
(28:01):
twenty three, and was appointed judge of Plaquemine Parish by
his cousin in nineteen nineteen. Early on, he was accused
of being corrupt. An example of that corruption he once
scheduled as judge. He scheduled seven murder cases to be
tried on the same day. All of the accused were
murderers involved in the illegal trade of liquor. They were bootleggers,
(28:25):
and it's alleged that Leander Perez wanted to protect them.
As I understand it, all of them were acquitted because
of the shortness of the trial. That's pretty slick if
you're wanting to be corrupt. Then later in nineteen twenty three,
while he was still really young, there was an impeachment
petition charged against him to impeach him as judge, and
(28:47):
there were twenty three specific charges against him that included
a bunch of stuff. But one of them on the
list was that he had a pearl handled revolver on
his person during court hearings. People didn't like that. Another
one was that he used county money to take people
to the restaurants of his friends, avoiding his political enemies
(29:10):
who owned restaurants. That's interesting, but most of them involved finances.
He would ultimately be acquitted when he and this is
when he was a young man, which empowered him even
more for the rest of his life. He kind of
got away with it and he thought, I will do
whatever I want in this place, and he did. But
(29:31):
what he would become most known for was his stance
on racial issues. But as with all people, everyone had
a different opinion of Leander Perez. Here's Paul, I've read
a book about Leander Perez. You knew the man or
(29:55):
met him?
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah, quite a few times.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
He perceived around here. Is he a hero or is
he a vig?
Speaker 3 (30:01):
They don't even know him no more.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
I think he was a I think basically he was
a good man. He uh he was a segregationist completely
and he ran that parish with a pretty stiff hand.
But it was a good parish. It was a uh
it was well, it was the wealthiest. It was the
(30:25):
wealthiest parish in the United States.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
He kind of had the reputation of being like a
crooked politician.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
I mean, uh yeah, I said, hey, well crook, I say,
all of them will crooked. It was like the cowboys
days down here. And but they had good points to
him too, you know, they claim he was he was
such a bad man with the black people. I had
a buddy of mine, he me and he was in
army together, went through basic training and all but friends, all,
(30:56):
you know, till he died. And he told he was
in the ballroom down there, and when day his motor
had broke down in his boat. He's oyster fisherman and
his motor has broken his boat. And the ballrooms down
there had had imaginary line running through the middle of them.
The white people stood on one side and the black
people stood on the other side. And he was in
(31:18):
the ballroom by the bar, and Leanda Press walked in
and he asked him. He said, Paul, what now, what's
the matter? You're not working? You wanted he wanted a
burdy working when people making a living for himself, and
he said, well, my motor's broken. My boat, Judge, he says,
I can't work. He said, right now until I can
make some money and get another motor. And uh he
(31:39):
told me, he said, Paul, he said, go up to
Donovan that was the main place where you got your
motives and all up in the city. He said, put
get your the motor you need and put it on
my charge account. He said, but I want you to
pay me. He said, you're come and pay me. He said, okay, judge.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
So and this this, Paul, this is the guy that
you knew, Yeah, when I was in army and he
was the black guy.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Black yeah, yeah, a fine boy, fine man. He wasn't
no boy. He was a man, a piece of man too.
But anyway, yeah, he uh, he had a lot. He
had He had everybody. Everybody's got good and bad in him.
You know, it's what's good to one personally be bad
for somebody else. Looking at a situation, when did you
(32:21):
meet Leander Press When I was a child, a kid,
fourteen twelve, fourteen, fifteen years old, Leander Peret brought the
first charlet bull from Mexico in here and he sent
an oyster boat with the with the they had pens
on oyster boat. The whole oyster's on the deck. They
(32:41):
put the pens up and went down there and got
him a bull and he brought it to Idle Wall
that's on the other side of the river. That was
his his place on the other side of the river.
And old man the Bella took us. I can remember
him taking this there and the judge was sitting on
the front porch and he all at the judge, he said, well,
look at the boat. Yeah, right back then look at
it like that big, big animal. Boy. You know what
(33:07):
he had asked you. You caught you on the street
being good. Oh boy, you're being good? Oh boy, yeah, judge,
you know you'd asked if he was being good.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
You know, that was the time when Hughey Long was
the governor, and so there was like there was just
a lot of kind of these big, strong politicians that
just ruled the land.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Yep. Yeah, he told you. He told you Long. He said,
if I could take Packham in Parish and push it
off into the Gulf and get away from the United States,
I do it. And you along told him I wish
you could.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
He wanted it to be like his own nations.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
It was it was I tell you what, there wasn't
a piece of trash on that road. You couldn't found
a cigarette butter on that road. Cleanest place I want
to see in your life. Beautiful.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Here's David responding to Paul's story of Leander helping the
guy out with the boat motor and.
Speaker 5 (34:06):
Look, there's not to say that, you know, Leander was
not incapable of doing the occasional kind gesture for someone.
But he made his bones, you know, using African Americans
as targets of you know, prejudice and bigotry and scaring
(34:28):
white people into saying, you know, I'm going to keep
them out of the parish kind of thing, or I'm
going to control them, they're not going to let them vote,
or so. Yeah, he could occasionally throw a bone to someone,
a kind gesture here or there, but mainly he was not.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
A good person.
Speaker 5 (34:50):
He was I think a very greedy, selfish, arrogant man
who he was basically an amoral.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Leander Perez became nationally known during the Civil rights movement
as being a staunch segregationist and just classic good old
fashioned bigot and David's movie Delta Justice. They played a
clip of Leander on William F. Buckley's national talk show
where he was asked directly about being a bigot, and
(35:22):
Leander's answer was so repulsive Noah had permission to play it.
It was just too grubby and I couldn't do it.
But I'm glad that David put it on his movie.
Speaker 5 (35:35):
That's why I put the William A Fuckwee clip in there,
because I said, I didn't make this up here he is.
Here's here's the guy himself confessing on national television his beliefs.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 5 (35:47):
But other than that, people, I'll tell you my story.
When we released the film on DVD. It was during
the Islnios Festival, which was in April of the following year,
which would have been twenty sixteen, and this elderly African
American gentleman came in and he said, are you mister Dubos.
I said yes, I am. He said, you're the gentleman
who made the movie about the trappers war. I said yes.
(36:12):
He said you're selling those DVDs. I said yes, sir,
and I said I'll take ten of them. He pulls
out one hundred dollars pill because we were like ten
bucks each. And I said, can I ask why A
you're buying ten of them? He said, I want to
give them to my grandchildren. Because I went to see
your movie at the film festival. He said, I came
back and started your film three times. I watched you
(36:34):
do your Q and A after every he said, and
I just wanted to thank you for showing what kind
of person Leandon Perez was. And he said, I want
to teach that to my children and grandchildren. But you know,
so they're people's people are complicated. I think Leander was
(36:56):
in some ways complicated, but in other ways, I think
he saw a way to use his power and his
wealth and his influence to a negative degree. So much so,
like Carville said in the film, he's the most odious
person in the history of Luisiana. And that says a
lot because there's been a lot of people going through
(37:18):
this state that have been notorious people.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
What about this part of the world produces kind of
these dictator type leaders.
Speaker 5 (37:29):
We've had a colorful history of politicians here. Perez is
just one of them. Edwin Edwards was our governor for
many years. I think he served three terms, and he
was a very colorful Cajun Democrat governor. He was on
Sixty Minutes. He just meant Edwin was he was kind
(37:55):
of like Clinton magnified. He loved women, he loved drinking,
he loved gambling. He got caught carrying a suitcase of
a million dollars into a casino one time. Sixty Minutes
asked him about it, and he said, they said, you know,
that's quite unusual for a governor to be carrying Goes misity.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
It's unusual.
Speaker 5 (38:19):
And I just kind of like stopped and they looked up, like, well,
don't you think that's he Goes. I don't know if
it's illegal, it's unusual, but you know, it just kind
of like brushed it off with the seventies and then
again in the eighties. It was a race in eighty
eight when he ran against David Duke, who was the
notorious clansman who ran for governor, and Edwin had to
(38:40):
come back and said, there used to be a famous
bumper sticker said vote for the crook, meaning Edwin, it's
important over Duke.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Vote for the crook. It's important. Yeah, wow, what about
Huey Long.
Speaker 5 (38:57):
Huey Long was another and again on Randy Newman's there's
a song called the Kingfish. It was about Huey Long.
He was a very highly respected and very popular populist governor,
so he would be the equivalent of kind of uh,
(39:19):
a more moderate version of Bernie Sanders might be a
good description of him. He was very much giving back
to the people. But if you ever saw All the
King's Men, which is a famous Hollywood movie with Broderick Crawford,
he played essentially Huey Long. That was a Pulitzerprise winning book,
and they did a remake with Sean Penn which wasn't good.
(39:43):
But the original film is wonderful and it's about Huey Long,
and it's about how even the best intentioned person, once
they get to power, you know, absolute power corrups absolutely.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Kind of thing.
Speaker 5 (39:56):
And Huey Long, you know, he did kick out stand
oil from essentially, you know, stealing the oil from the
land owners was kind of like a bigger version of
the Trappers War. But Hughey was again a colorful character.
And then his brother, Earl Long. They made a movie
(40:16):
about him called Blaze with Paul Newman in the eighties,
and Earl was quite a character. Earl was institutionalized while
he was governor, and then he so the.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Two brothers both were governors at different times.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
Yeah, well, let me tell you this quick story about
Earl Long. So he's in a mental institution because the
people wanted to take over the state threw him in there,
and then he found a loophole where called the guy
in charge of mental institutions. He said, is this so
and so on the line who runs the mental institution
I'm currently in. Yes it is this is the governor
(40:49):
Earl Long. You're fired. I'm here by appointing you know
so and so to being which was his friend. He says,
I here by release ear Along. You know, very famous
story which is hit it in the movie with Paul Newman. Yeah,
Earl was a character Huey was. You know, he had
his handle a lot of pockets. Again, when you're in
(41:10):
charge of a state like Louisiana, which at the time
was oil rich, mineral rich. Today even I think something
like forty percent or it might be as high as
sixty percent of the natural gas in the country comes
from here. I mean, Louisiana is one of the most
(41:32):
important states we in terms of providing services for the
country and so when you are the governor of this state,
you have a lot of power and even but back
then it was magnified because there wasn't a lot of
oil drilling, but the ones that were being done in
Louisiana were, I mean it was. It was unbelievably rich.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
A lot of people made a lot of money. And
they didn't have the Internet, no tell on people, they
didn't have nothing cell phones and email communications. It was
just an environment that I guess lended itself to potentially.
Speaker 5 (42:09):
Look, man, when you are in charge of something and
if you are tempted by millions of dollars and the
power to get away with it, human nature is going
to dictate that. That's hard to resist because look what's
going on now, what look at all the things that
have happened in our country over the last fifty years,
(42:32):
just from politicians going to jail, whether it was Watergate
or all the things, you know, and he never sees
sometimes the people in charge, like a lot of people
around Clinton and Trump went to jail, but they didn't,
you know. So yeah, you got to wonder, you know,
(42:54):
keep their hands clean. Everybody else is going to dirty
them for them, you know. So they've learned a lot
since then. Here we long was assassinated by the way
in the state capitol, on the steps of the capitol.
There's a lot of conspiracy theories about.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
That, but he was really I mean, the same story
on a very small scale involving muskrats that happened with
Leander Perez.
Speaker 5 (43:17):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
I mean it's like, yeah, at some level, you talk
about a story about big oil money and governing a state,
this was Leander Perez just had his parish that he
was the king of.
Speaker 5 (43:31):
He was the dictator of his own parish for sure.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
So it's this thing scales inside of people power scales.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Absolutely.
Speaker 5 (43:46):
You've seen the film, yes, do you remember the last
shot of the film, So the ending shot is of
what looks like a muskrat. I ended the film with
that image because it's like all of this fighting, all
of this bloodshed and warfare and animosity over this creature,
(44:09):
and it's just sort of the matter of factness of
the animal who's just oblivious to its environment, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
You know, it also shows the frivolity of human nature too,
that's right, that we were willing to kill in order
to get this little little animal. Yeah, that's not even
nobody wants fur coats, nobody. I mean, fur trade's kind
of coming back just a little bit in some places.
But it was this fashion trend, you know, that pushed
(44:38):
people in this time to do this kind of extreme stuff.
Speaker 5 (44:41):
Yeah. Here humans are fighting over money and land, and
here are these animals. They're just still oblivious to the
insanity that we are producting in our daily lives and
they're just going about their business.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Is there something that we can learn about human nature?
About people? Like, what's the what's the value in this story?
Speaker 1 (45:09):
I'd have to look at leand the Perez's position that
some men, I guess I would want that power to
do what they want to do.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
So that's that shows you that there's kind of dangerous
people out there.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Oh yeah, well Leander wasn't the first one. It is
not going to be the last one. There's always some
people like that out there. You know that they just
when they get a certain amount of power, it just
upsets them, you know, I guess m hm. So you know,
(45:43):
somebody mentions LeAnn the Perez that's this is all I
can think of. He tried to kill more people. H Yeah,
other people may look at him different, but I can
(46:05):
it's sad.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Looking into the lives of humans is wildly interesting and
to me, especially when it overlaps with wildlife, even muskrats.
But inside of these stories, I think that we can
learn so much. And as a final thought in regards
to the animals, today, muskrats are almost completely gone out
(46:33):
of Louisiana. They have been ecologically replaced by the invasive nutria.
In the last few years, less than four hundred muskrats
were trapped annually in the whole state, down from millions
one hundred years ago. Things are always changing and Wimpy
(46:54):
Serenai and Paul Leguard's family land on Delacroix Island, where
their families used to trap, are now almost completely underwater
as South Louisiana continues to sink. It's a wild story.
I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease Brins,
(47:15):
This Country Life and Lakes Backwoods University. Please leave us
a review on iTunes, share this podcast directly with a friend,
share it on social media. We thank you so much
for your support this Bear Grease feed and what we're
doing keep the wild places wild because that's where the
(47:37):
bears live.
The stretch that the fought. The battle was taken is
by a mile. So the boat was going and they
was with the machine gun and the people from Delhiphot
were shooting over the level, you know, just shooting the
shot gun, the rifles whatever they had. Yeah, a lot
of them with bird shot, lot on wood buckshot would
kill the machine gun man. I don't know. I guess
(00:28):
just just shot them up with the way I understand.
The mortar was all shot up the boat. The cabin
on the boat was all shot up with bullet holes.
I guess that's what I could see, you know.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
On this episode, we're getting into the nitty gritty details
of the November nineteen twenty six one day. It is
Laanio's Trappers War in South Louisiana over muskrat trapping rights.
We'll hear from two men whose fathers were involved in
the war. But a bigger question to me is why
(01:01):
is this region of the country known for producing corrupt leaders?
And is that even a fair question? This is a
look into human nature when it's corrupted by power and muskrats.
I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one.
And for anyone new to the bear Grease Feed. We
(01:21):
have multiple podcasts on this feed, bear Grease, The Render,
Brent's Country Life and Lake Pickles Backwoods University. The complexity
can be daunting, but the good times just keep rolling.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. My name is klay
(01:50):
Nukem and this is the bear Grease Podcast where we'll
explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely
places and where will tell the story of Americans who
lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f
HF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear
(02:12):
as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore.
We established in the last episode the culture of the
Islamios trappers camps on Delacroix Island in Louisiana in the
nineteen twenties and how muskrat soared in value, making formerly
(02:37):
almost worthless swampland extremely valuable. This is Placamine Parish's Paul Legard.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
In those days, there wasn't no you owned this piece
of land, and now the guy I owned up. It
was all opened priory. It was just like Wild West.
And when you know when a story at the beginning
of the season, you went out Dan, you picked out
spot and you put your trap on out and people
honored each other's areas. You know. You said. That went
(03:08):
on for a few years, and the politicians got involved
with it, but what they wanted to do was take
a percentage away from each trapper, and they wouldn't go
for it. People have been trapping at Landfa at that
time almost one hundred and fifty years, you know, and
(03:31):
now they had camps. People used to build camps in
the priory for they could. The whole family went out
there and uh in some cases, and they spent the winter,
you know, trapping, and the women were cooking to take
care of as far as the men we're in up
properly working well. They pushed them on those camps and
(03:55):
they brought in trappers from West Louisiana are Texas. They
brought in own trappers and put them into camps.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
What Paul is calling the prairie is what I understand
to be Swampland the people who had trapped here for
one hundred and fifty years were getting pushed out by
the politicians bringing in trappers from the outside. They'd been
double crossed by one of their own, a man named
Leander Perez, who had become the chairman of the Trappers Association.
(04:28):
He was also a judge in Plaquemine Parish. But when
he saw an opportunity to make a bunch of money,
he pushed out his own people and brought in new
trappers that played by his rules, paid more money for
the trapping leases, and sold the furs to him. The
Islanos were not gonna take this from Perez. Here's what
(04:49):
they did to the new trappers that were now in
their old camps.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
My grandfather told them that those camps were not but
more or less a platform. They build a big platform
and they put a top paper shack around it, and
he said they they're waiting a gang of fellas, not
one guy, but a bunch of fellaws. Would wait until
(05:16):
say ten o'clock in the morning, when all the men
were out in the in the prairie trapping, and they
go and they take tell them, women, take all your
stuff and make it. They told us they didn't try
to hurt those people because they were working people, just
like they were. They make them take everything out the camp,
their supplies, their beds there, whatever they had, and they
(05:37):
you know, they had fifteen twenty guys. They picked that camp.
I'm trying to buy the whole camp. We're going to
buy you. So when that happened, they brought into Texas
Rangers to protect them, and uh, that's when the real
trouble started.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
The real trouble started as Perez hired mercenaries to kill
and intimidate the eslonos. I'm trying to make sense of
how trapping muskrats could bring a community to bloodshed. We're
not talking about gold or black dirt, farmland or oil,
but a rat. We've been backed into a corner here, folks,
(06:15):
We've got to talk just a little bit about muskrats.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
My name is Martin Cooker.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
I work for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fishers in
Parks and I currently serve as the Nuisance Species program
Bologist and also the Furbearer Program Bologist.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
This guy is a muskrat expert.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
A rare breed, but the muskrat is in the rodent family,
native to the US and Canada. In the US, it
has at least fourteen different subspecies Virginia, Rocky Mountain, the
Oregon Coast, Nevada, the Great Plains, So there are subspecies
really depending on location, they're going to be about nine
(06:54):
fourteen inches long with a with a tail anywhere from
seven to twelve inches, so you're talking about twenty four
twenty six inches head to the end of the tail.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
They're going to weigh.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Anywhere from like a pounds and a half to four
and a half pounds. Muskrats weren't really seeing that much
in Louisiana until like the late eighteen hundreds, especially like
in the coastal parishes. One of the things that they
put forth is that the decline in alligators due to
hunting and with the burning of the marshes to locate
(07:24):
the alligators, and also with the reduction in minx, all
were linked to the muskrat increase. Now, after that the
predators were gone away, the habitat's gone up, and then
the mush rats appeared in the millions. It was just
like a population explosion. It was an article in the
(07:44):
nineteen oh two in the New York Times. The headline
was the muskrat is the principal fur producer in America.
There was a quote from the I think the Fort
Worth Star in nineteen oh eight in this stated that
Louisiana has the largest fur trade in the world, all right,
And that now that is verifiable if you go back
and look at the records in Louisiana was the fur
(08:06):
trapping capital of the US fourth it was more first
coming from Louisiana anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
The muskrat trade peaked around nineteen twenty five, when they
were worth a dollar thirty each and a good trapper
could catch as many as one hundred and fifty day,
yielding thousands of dollars during the seventy five day season,
and several millions of dollars worth of muskrat firs were
flowing through Placamine Parish alone. I could see Steve Ranella
(08:32):
wanting to get in on that. Here is Wimpy Serenae.
He's eighty four years old and was raised on Delacroix
Island in the trapping camps. He's going to take us
right into the One Day War.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
What happened with Perez in that it was long before parting,
you know, get out, but uh, Perez gathered up cagunes
from the west part of Louisiana, Texans gunslingers at that time,
it was really gun slingers, and he formed like a
(09:13):
little army. He monitored a machine gun on oyster board.
I think it was either boat. You know. What happened
before they attacked the people from Dinna crew found out
about it, that they were planning this thing. Matter of fact,
my dad used to have relatives in what they called
(09:33):
Kinnharven and uh, these Texans and that was hanging around
the ballrooms there, you know, and you heard overheard them saying,
we're gonna make some Spanish shop. Body these jokes down here,
you know. Yeah, so they found out about that day.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Who was your dad involved in finding out about it?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, he found out about it, and I guess other
people did too, because they had relatives in Knoven And
this is what these guys used to hang on when
they was starting to get together, you know, and going
to barrooms in that and I guess they talked and
sort of people from Della Cruill find out that they
will come in.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
After almost one hundred years, the people from Delacroix Island
still recalled the words that started this war and maybe
saved their lives. They overheard someone saying that they were
going to make some Spanish soup. And if you remember,
the Islanios were originally from the Canary islands off the
coast of Spain. So this region, this island, they spoke Spanish.
(10:38):
Here's filmmaker David Dubos who made the film Delta Justice,
the Islanios trappers.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
War word filtered down from They got into a bar
not too far from where the Islanians were, and it
was literally just guys bragging in a bar that they
were going to go down to Ela Crow and make
Spanish soup out of the Islanios and just loud, drunken
(11:06):
stupidity and arrogance, and was overheard. And they went back
and told them what was happening, and you know that
was it.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
So this this gunboat with these Texas Rangers, this machine
gun mounted on the boat come down, comes down the bayou.
There's a levee, yeah, which is like a damn that's
keeping the bayou from going into the onto the land.
And behind the levee is the Islanio's houses.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Author Glenn Jeanson estimated there to be four hundred armed
Islanios on the levee waiting on this gun boat when
it arrived. The machine gun was essentially a gatling gun
like on a World War two boat, and the captain
of the boat was J. H Asher, a former Texas
ranger from Dallas. They had no idea they were going
(11:55):
to be met with resistance. They thought they were just
going to take the boat down the bayou and just
splattered the Islaono's camps with rounds from that machine gun.
Who knew these people were so passionate about muskrats.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
And the way I understand it, they moneled the machine
gun on the boat, and so they monited and they
came up what they called gentility. It was, you know,
the island, like I said, with the with the machine
gun and all of the Texans in that. But the
people from down there was ready. So they got their
shot gun. There was a levee whe whether if you
(12:33):
go down there, you can see the road is on
the levee the highway, and it was a higher levee
than what it is today because everything's singing, but anyway,
it was much higher. So they got behind the limit
with the shot and guns and whatever guns that they had,
and when they made the turn into the Bayer Terra
buff you know, they started with the machine gun, but
(12:56):
they also went I got back up a little bit.
It took the machine gun the night before and set
it to shoot over the levee, over the bank, you know,
to buying the bank. But what happened when they attacked
the next morning, the tide went down.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
So they had to fix the machine gun, but it
couldn't reach the Islanios because.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
They couldn't angle upwards correct.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
So they were kind of stuck.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
You know.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
They tried to get it up and hang it up,
but that those things were enormously heavy. And then you're
in the line of fire too.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
You have to remember that. So so when they couldn't
adjust it, that machine gun like the dude and did
it kind of so when they would shoot, it was
hitting the levee instead of hitting the people because the
tide went down, and so they would hit the bank. So,
you know, they didn't the machine gun didn't do them
(13:58):
too much good. And of Coastal had the other people
with their pistols and guns and what have you, and
they started that they wore right there and they they
shot up the the machine gun boat. They killed the
the only one was killed, the gun, the guy that
was running the machine gun boat. You know, quite a
(14:20):
few guns, quite a few guns.
Speaker 5 (14:22):
Well.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
The stretch that the fought the battle was taken is
about let's see, about a mile, so you know where
where the battle took place, where they was at, where
they were.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Set shooting that whole mile down the canal this gun ship.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
As to what our vision, the boat was going, and
they was with the machine gun and the people from
Delapert were shooting over the level, you know, just shooting.
They shot guns and rifles whatever they had. Yeah, you know,
because a lot of them had just shotguns, you know,
a lot of them with bird shot, a lot of
them with buckshot, you know, and would killed the machine
(15:01):
gun man.
Speaker 5 (15:02):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
I guess just just shot them up with the way
I understand that the mortar was all shot up the boat.
The cabin on the boat was all shining up with
bullet holes. I guess that's what I could see.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, the man who was killed, Sam Galland, was reported
by the coroner they had seventeen bullet holes in his body.
Speaker 5 (15:27):
But these leios had, you know, the trajectory sort of
like a forty five degree trajectory angle on that boat
where they could just fire away. And yeah, they wounded
several of them and killed one. But yeah, that's like
you're literally walking into a I mean, I don't know
(15:47):
what you would call them. In the military. Sometimes in
these wars, they you know, you get trapped like that,
you're just you just just no way out.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
So you have studied about this and talked to all
these different people, who do you think fired the first shot?
Speaker 5 (16:02):
Probably the Islanios. Probably they weren't gonna sit there and
let them fire a machine gun at him.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
One, only one person was killed, one Texas ranger whose
last name was Gowland, Sam Gowland. He was the one
operating the machine gun. The other ones were driven away
and they went looking for Perez. They were going to
kill him. That's how angry they were, as you can imagine.
And Perez escaped and managed to get out of town
(16:33):
literally by getting over into New Orleans and getting out
of the parish.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Was Perez wasn't on the boat though.
Speaker 5 (16:42):
No, he was not, of course not. No, those were
his hired guns. Literally, he was nowhere near the boat.
He's not gonna get his hands dirty, He's not going
to get shot at. And I'm sure he had people
around him protecting him.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
It was your dad.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
There was your father there.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, he was there, yea. And like I was seeing
my dad had went to something happened, and I don't
know what it was. I just told these things that
these Texans and gunsling as well. When they started getting
shot at, they started running through the march and they
shot him up, you know, but they didn't kill them all.
(17:25):
And they got all shot up, and one of them
was coming swimming across the bay. And this is when
I'm one of the incident. I was told and a
friend of my dad they said, look, that's the guy
that tried to beat you up and off in the couch.
And uh, my dad had an Elsie Smith shot double
(17:45):
shotgun and I didn't know, but he had it in
the in our attic and he never did use it.
I used to go up there and I could see
it and the stock was cracked, you know. And somebody
else told me that my dad hit that guy with
the stock of a shotgun and they broke the stock.
Oh wow, And I remember the shotgun. It was an
(18:07):
old Elsie Smith and the stock was broken.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Paul told me the same story about Whimpy's dad breaking
a gun stock off one of the boatman's heads. Here
is Paul with an unusual story of a first hand
account from a man on the boat involving a wild
coincidence with the dog and a guy named to What's
(18:34):
Yep to What's.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
I'm going to tell you another little story of cut
fits right into this. My daddy used to buy crabs
before he died. My daddy died when he was thirty
eight years old. I was fifteen fifteen is on when
he died, and we used to go to old on
Highway eleven. They had a family over there. They were
s stands. The old man was Pete and he had
(19:00):
a son that was Pete. One of them was towards
uh old man, Old Man Pete. His daddy was on
the boat when they shot it up. Like I said,
those people had no education and they looked to make
a dollar whatever they could make a dollar. And he
wasn't from Dela Crown. But they come there the trap.
(19:24):
When the trapping was good, they stayed. He said, well,
some kind of way he got mixed up and got
on that boat. He must They must have gave him
a job, that can of whatever, and he got on
that boat. And he told me, he said, when they
started shooting that boat, the cast net LEDs were bouncing off,
And I asked him, said the cast that they said, Yeah,
(19:46):
they take a cast net ledge. It's got a whole
clean through it, you know, the castle. Yeah, And they
had smashed the end of that and they put that
in the shotgun shell he said. He said, the cast
that LEDs were bouncing off. He said, But them steel jackinson,
them rifle shells was going clean through red boat. And
it wasn't no steel boat late they had. There was
a wood boat, he said. And he said, what happened,
(20:09):
he was sleeping on the other side of the motor away.
It happened early in the morning. He's sleeping on the
other side of the motor and he said, three or
four of them Texas Rangers jumped on top of him,
trying to get away from getting behind that motor you said,
getting trying to get away from there. And uh, well,
let me back up a minute. We used to go
(20:31):
over there and buy crabs. We'd buy crabs or fifty
two pounds hamp of crabs for four dollars of hamper
number ones and uh but anyway, we were over there
buying him and old man, old man Pete was there.
He had a bunch of old cars and trucks stuff.
You know junk, and they had a dog in there,
(20:53):
and that dog come out wanting to eat or something.
He told, told that dog, go let down. Dog. The
doge went it was button back and laid down. And
he told me saying, no, that dog is now I
can't remember exiety. It was sixteen at eighteen years old,
he said, I've been having that dog a long time,
the old dog. We went in the house, he told
(21:17):
told a story about that being behind that mode and
them Texas rangers and all jumping on top of him
and all. And when we come out of there to leave,
that dog was dead. I'll never forget that the dog
was laying their dead. He died. Why he told that story.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, it's odd the things you remember that seemed completely disconnected.
But I think these are mechanisms in our mind to
help us remember the important stuff. Like an eighteen year
old dog dying while the man was telling you about
being on the gun ship. That's just odds. What I'm
(22:00):
here for, Paul, good story here is wimpy. I'm trying
to understand, like how the thing could escalate to where
lander Perez was willing.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
To kill people?
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Yeah, how did that?
Speaker 1 (22:16):
How does that happen. The only thing I can understand
is that he told these guys, all these people that
he's hired, Look, uh, we have to take care of
the people at Dental Croil, and you're going to have
the all this trapping lands and you can trap it
as long as you give me a percentage of whatever
you're catching all that, and you're going to have the
land instead of instead of and we got to run
(22:38):
them all and even if we have to kill Wow.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
That was so he just had that that strong of
an iron fist. He was isolated enough down in the
deep Delta that he just thought, I can I can
do anything.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
That's why I kind of consider him a dictator. You know,
he had that Powell and he thought he can just
do anything until he faced the people from Golacron. What
about his.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Reputation here, Like if you were to go on the street,
like when we drove here, we drove down.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Perez Drive, Yeah, in the Pere Rive, well, a lot
of the politicians were with you in Saint Benod.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Perez Drive was named after Leander Perez in nineteen sixty nine,
but in the late nineteen nineties, after history had kind
of showed who this guy was and had judged him.
The name of the road was changed to be named
after a more likable judge named Melvin Perez, so it
(23:48):
remains Perez Drive. It's just a different Perez. What tell
me how your dad handled the trappers war? So he
he is actually there on the levee with a gun,
did he? He didn't view that it's like something real
honorable that he had done, like he had defended his people.
(24:12):
Or was it just kind of like something he didn't
want to talk about.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Right, He didn't talk about it too much. I guess
he felt like it was survival. He had to fight
to savive.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Like it wasn't a cool story to him, like today
it was today one hundred years later, we're like, wow.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Wow, this is what happened. Oh, it wasn't. It wasn't
no big honor or nothing like that. It was just
something that he had to do that he didn't want
to do, but he had to do it to savive.
Isn't either kill or be killed.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
It's interesting in the history because it's real easy to
like kind of glorify something good and bad one hundred
years later, and but back in the day, we might
have thought this was the least interesting thing that ever happened.
We're just like this is a bad thing, Like this
shows kind of the the evil of mankind. What what
do you think about that?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Uh? I think about what a person with power would
try to do to maintain that power. That would be
land a parath even if he had to kill to
do any he did it. That's how I look at it.
As far as a lot of people liked land in Parrett,
but I couldn't cry.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
It's it's kind of wild to think about people having
a right trying to kill each other over a muskrat, right,
you know that's today.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
You look at it, man and people killed him something
or mushkranchy a well living you know, you had to survive.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Here's a simple version of how the conflict reached its
final resolution. It involved a guy named Manuel Malaro that
was in Islanias. So the people went to Manuel Malario.
He was an educated man with money, successful, They said,
can you help us? He buys the lane?
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Right he and what does he do? He just wanted
to In other words, he was a good businessman. Also,
let's face that, you know. So what he did is
he went and where and formed Delacrat Corporation named it
after Delacrot, and he bought it, and then people would
(26:29):
trap for him because he would buy it afar. Delacro
Corporation would buy it afar. Okay, Okay, Like I said,
he's a businessman, you know, true businessman. So he buys
all this land. Okay, okay, this is the only way
I can do it. You know, I'll buy the land
we bought it from. I got it. I don't. I
wouldn't know, but I'd have to think that he had
(26:56):
to make some kind of arrangement with Leeann the Reds.
But talking to his granddaughter, they hated land the press,
you know, and I thought, wow, how can he buy
this land when out going through the dictator of Plagamin Parish.
I couldn't answer that. But he didn't buy it, and
(27:17):
then he sold it to the trappers, the people from Delacrow.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
So he sold the land back to them. He didn't
lease it to him.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
No, we could some of them. Some people didn't buy land,
but they're all. Even if you bought the land, you
had to sell you for the Delacrat Corperation.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
So Malario ended up being the good guy. The only
difference between he and Perez is that he was fair
in his dealings with the Islanos. But I think we
have got to take a closer look at Leander Perez.
He was born in eighteen ninety one and Placuamine Parish
and raised in a wealthy Catholic family. Graduated from lsu
with the Law in nineteen fourteen at the age of
(28:01):
twenty three, and was appointed judge of Plaquemine Parish by
his cousin in nineteen nineteen. Early on, he was accused
of being corrupt. An example of that corruption he once
scheduled as judge. He scheduled seven murder cases to be
tried on the same day. All of the accused were
murderers involved in the illegal trade of liquor. They were bootleggers,
(28:25):
and it's alleged that Leander Perez wanted to protect them.
As I understand it, all of them were acquitted because
of the shortness of the trial. That's pretty slick if
you're wanting to be corrupt. Then later in nineteen twenty three,
while he was still really young, there was an impeachment
petition charged against him to impeach him as judge, and
(28:47):
there were twenty three specific charges against him that included
a bunch of stuff. But one of them on the
list was that he had a pearl handled revolver on
his person during court hearings. People didn't like that. Another
one was that he used county money to take people
to the restaurants of his friends, avoiding his political enemies
(29:10):
who owned restaurants. That's interesting, but most of them involved finances.
He would ultimately be acquitted when he and this is
when he was a young man, which empowered him even
more for the rest of his life. He kind of
got away with it and he thought, I will do
whatever I want in this place, and he did. But
(29:31):
what he would become most known for was his stance
on racial issues. But as with all people, everyone had
a different opinion of Leander Perez. Here's Paul, I've read
a book about Leander Perez. You knew the man or
(29:55):
met him?
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah, quite a few times.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
He perceived around here. Is he a hero or is
he a vig?
Speaker 3 (30:01):
They don't even know him no more.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
I think he was a I think basically he was
a good man. He uh he was a segregationist completely
and he ran that parish with a pretty stiff hand.
But it was a good parish. It was a uh
it was well, it was the wealthiest. It was the
(30:25):
wealthiest parish in the United States.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
He kind of had the reputation of being like a
crooked politician.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
I mean, uh yeah, I said, hey, well crook, I say,
all of them will crooked. It was like the cowboys
days down here. And but they had good points to
him too, you know, they claim he was he was
such a bad man with the black people. I had
a buddy of mine, he me and he was in
army together, went through basic training and all but friends, all,
(30:56):
you know, till he died. And he told he was
in the ballroom down there, and when day his motor
had broke down in his boat. He's oyster fisherman and
his motor has broken his boat. And the ballrooms down
there had had imaginary line running through the middle of them.
The white people stood on one side and the black
people stood on the other side. And he was in
(31:18):
the ballroom by the bar, and Leanda Press walked in
and he asked him. He said, Paul, what now, what's
the matter? You're not working? You wanted he wanted a
burdy working when people making a living for himself, and
he said, well, my motor's broken. My boat, Judge, he says,
I can't work. He said, right now until I can
make some money and get another motor. And uh he
(31:39):
told me, he said, Paul, he said, go up to
Donovan that was the main place where you got your
motives and all up in the city. He said, put
get your the motor you need and put it on
my charge account. He said, but I want you to
pay me. He said, you're come and pay me. He said, okay, judge.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
So and this this, Paul, this is the guy that
you knew, Yeah, when I was in army and he
was the black guy.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Black yeah, yeah, a fine boy, fine man. He wasn't
no boy. He was a man, a piece of man too.
But anyway, yeah, he uh, he had a lot. He
had He had everybody. Everybody's got good and bad in him.
You know, it's what's good to one personally be bad
for somebody else. Looking at a situation, when did you
(32:21):
meet Leander Press When I was a child, a kid,
fourteen twelve, fourteen, fifteen years old, Leander Peret brought the
first charlet bull from Mexico in here and he sent
an oyster boat with the with the they had pens
on oyster boat. The whole oyster's on the deck. They
(32:41):
put the pens up and went down there and got
him a bull and he brought it to Idle Wall
that's on the other side of the river. That was
his his place on the other side of the river.
And old man the Bella took us. I can remember
him taking this there and the judge was sitting on
the front porch and he all at the judge, he said, well,
look at the boat. Yeah, right back then look at
it like that big, big animal. Boy. You know what
(33:07):
he had asked you. You caught you on the street
being good. Oh boy, you're being good? Oh boy, yeah, judge,
you know you'd asked if he was being good.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
You know, that was the time when Hughey Long was
the governor, and so there was like there was just
a lot of kind of these big, strong politicians that
just ruled the land.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Yep. Yeah, he told you. He told you Long. He said,
if I could take Packham in Parish and push it
off into the Gulf and get away from the United States,
I do it. And you along told him I wish
you could.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
He wanted it to be like his own nations.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
It was it was I tell you what, there wasn't
a piece of trash on that road. You couldn't found
a cigarette butter on that road. Cleanest place I want
to see in your life. Beautiful.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Here's David responding to Paul's story of Leander helping the
guy out with the boat motor and.
Speaker 5 (34:06):
Look, there's not to say that, you know, Leander was
not incapable of doing the occasional kind gesture for someone.
But he made his bones, you know, using African Americans
as targets of you know, prejudice and bigotry and scaring
(34:28):
white people into saying, you know, I'm going to keep
them out of the parish kind of thing, or I'm
going to control them, they're not going to let them vote,
or so. Yeah, he could occasionally throw a bone to someone,
a kind gesture here or there, but mainly he was not.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
A good person.
Speaker 5 (34:50):
He was I think a very greedy, selfish, arrogant man
who he was basically an amoral.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Leander Perez became nationally known during the Civil rights movement
as being a staunch segregationist and just classic good old
fashioned bigot and David's movie Delta Justice. They played a
clip of Leander on William F. Buckley's national talk show
where he was asked directly about being a bigot, and
(35:22):
Leander's answer was so repulsive Noah had permission to play it.
It was just too grubby and I couldn't do it.
But I'm glad that David put it on his movie.
Speaker 5 (35:35):
That's why I put the William A Fuckwee clip in there,
because I said, I didn't make this up here he is.
Here's here's the guy himself confessing on national television his beliefs.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 5 (35:47):
But other than that, people, I'll tell you my story.
When we released the film on DVD. It was during
the Islnios Festival, which was in April of the following year,
which would have been twenty sixteen, and this elderly African
American gentleman came in and he said, are you mister Dubos.
I said yes, I am. He said, you're the gentleman
who made the movie about the trappers war. I said yes.
(36:12):
He said you're selling those DVDs. I said yes, sir,
and I said I'll take ten of them. He pulls
out one hundred dollars pill because we were like ten
bucks each. And I said, can I ask why A
you're buying ten of them? He said, I want to
give them to my grandchildren. Because I went to see
your movie at the film festival. He said, I came
back and started your film three times. I watched you
(36:34):
do your Q and A after every he said, and
I just wanted to thank you for showing what kind
of person Leandon Perez was. And he said, I want
to teach that to my children and grandchildren. But you know,
so they're people's people are complicated. I think Leander was
(36:56):
in some ways complicated, but in other ways, I think
he saw a way to use his power and his
wealth and his influence to a negative degree. So much so,
like Carville said in the film, he's the most odious
person in the history of Luisiana. And that says a
lot because there's been a lot of people going through
(37:18):
this state that have been notorious people.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
What about this part of the world produces kind of
these dictator type leaders.
Speaker 5 (37:29):
We've had a colorful history of politicians here. Perez is
just one of them. Edwin Edwards was our governor for
many years. I think he served three terms, and he
was a very colorful Cajun Democrat governor. He was on
Sixty Minutes. He just meant Edwin was he was kind
(37:55):
of like Clinton magnified. He loved women, he loved drinking,
he loved gambling. He got caught carrying a suitcase of
a million dollars into a casino one time. Sixty Minutes
asked him about it, and he said, they said, you know,
that's quite unusual for a governor to be carrying Goes misity.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
It's unusual.
Speaker 5 (38:19):
And I just kind of like stopped and they looked up, like, well,
don't you think that's he Goes. I don't know if
it's illegal, it's unusual, but you know, it just kind
of like brushed it off with the seventies and then
again in the eighties. It was a race in eighty
eight when he ran against David Duke, who was the
notorious clansman who ran for governor, and Edwin had to
(38:40):
come back and said, there used to be a famous
bumper sticker said vote for the crook, meaning Edwin, it's
important over Duke.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Vote for the crook. It's important. Yeah, wow, what about
Huey Long.
Speaker 5 (38:57):
Huey Long was another and again on Randy Newman's there's
a song called the Kingfish. It was about Huey Long.
He was a very highly respected and very popular populist governor,
so he would be the equivalent of kind of uh,
(39:19):
a more moderate version of Bernie Sanders might be a
good description of him. He was very much giving back
to the people. But if you ever saw All the
King's Men, which is a famous Hollywood movie with Broderick Crawford,
he played essentially Huey Long. That was a Pulitzerprise winning book,
and they did a remake with Sean Penn which wasn't good.
(39:43):
But the original film is wonderful and it's about Huey Long,
and it's about how even the best intentioned person, once
they get to power, you know, absolute power corrups absolutely.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Kind of thing.
Speaker 5 (39:56):
And Huey Long, you know, he did kick out stand
oil from essentially, you know, stealing the oil from the
land owners was kind of like a bigger version of
the Trappers War. But Hughey was again a colorful character.
And then his brother, Earl Long. They made a movie
(40:16):
about him called Blaze with Paul Newman in the eighties,
and Earl was quite a character. Earl was institutionalized while
he was governor, and then he so the.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Two brothers both were governors at different times.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
Yeah, well, let me tell you this quick story about
Earl Long. So he's in a mental institution because the
people wanted to take over the state threw him in there,
and then he found a loophole where called the guy
in charge of mental institutions. He said, is this so
and so on the line who runs the mental institution
I'm currently in. Yes it is this is the governor
(40:49):
Earl Long. You're fired. I'm here by appointing you know
so and so to being which was his friend. He says,
I here by release ear Along. You know, very famous
story which is hit it in the movie with Paul Newman. Yeah,
Earl was a character Huey was. You know, he had
his handle a lot of pockets. Again, when you're in
(41:10):
charge of a state like Louisiana, which at the time
was oil rich, mineral rich. Today even I think something
like forty percent or it might be as high as
sixty percent of the natural gas in the country comes
from here. I mean, Louisiana is one of the most
(41:32):
important states we in terms of providing services for the
country and so when you are the governor of this state,
you have a lot of power and even but back
then it was magnified because there wasn't a lot of
oil drilling, but the ones that were being done in
Louisiana were, I mean it was. It was unbelievably rich.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
A lot of people made a lot of money. And
they didn't have the Internet, no tell on people, they
didn't have nothing cell phones and email communications. It was
just an environment that I guess lended itself to potentially.
Speaker 5 (42:09):
Look, man, when you are in charge of something and
if you are tempted by millions of dollars and the
power to get away with it, human nature is going
to dictate that. That's hard to resist because look what's
going on now, what look at all the things that
have happened in our country over the last fifty years,
(42:32):
just from politicians going to jail, whether it was Watergate
or all the things, you know, and he never sees
sometimes the people in charge, like a lot of people
around Clinton and Trump went to jail, but they didn't,
you know. So yeah, you got to wonder, you know,
(42:54):
keep their hands clean. Everybody else is going to dirty
them for them, you know. So they've learned a lot
since then. Here we long was assassinated by the way
in the state capitol, on the steps of the capitol.
There's a lot of conspiracy theories about.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
That, but he was really I mean, the same story
on a very small scale involving muskrats that happened with
Leander Perez.
Speaker 5 (43:17):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
I mean it's like, yeah, at some level, you talk
about a story about big oil money and governing a state,
this was Leander Perez just had his parish that he
was the king of.
Speaker 5 (43:31):
He was the dictator of his own parish for sure.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
So it's this thing scales inside of people power scales.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Absolutely.
Speaker 5 (43:46):
You've seen the film, yes, do you remember the last
shot of the film, So the ending shot is of
what looks like a muskrat. I ended the film with
that image because it's like all of this fighting, all
of this bloodshed and warfare and animosity over this creature,
(44:09):
and it's just sort of the matter of factness of
the animal who's just oblivious to its environment, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
You know, it also shows the frivolity of human nature too,
that's right, that we were willing to kill in order
to get this little little animal. Yeah, that's not even
nobody wants fur coats, nobody. I mean, fur trade's kind
of coming back just a little bit in some places.
But it was this fashion trend, you know, that pushed
(44:38):
people in this time to do this kind of extreme stuff.
Speaker 5 (44:41):
Yeah. Here humans are fighting over money and land, and
here are these animals. They're just still oblivious to the
insanity that we are producting in our daily lives and
they're just going about their business.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Is there something that we can learn about human nature?
About people? Like, what's the what's the value in this story?
Speaker 1 (45:09):
I'd have to look at leand the Perez's position that
some men, I guess I would want that power to
do what they want to do.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
So that's that shows you that there's kind of dangerous
people out there.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Oh yeah, well Leander wasn't the first one. It is
not going to be the last one. There's always some
people like that out there. You know that they just
when they get a certain amount of power, it just
upsets them, you know, I guess m hm. So you know,
(45:43):
somebody mentions LeAnn the Perez that's this is all I
can think of. He tried to kill more people. H Yeah,
other people may look at him different, but I can
(46:05):
it's sad.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Looking into the lives of humans is wildly interesting and
to me, especially when it overlaps with wildlife, even muskrats.
But inside of these stories, I think that we can
learn so much. And as a final thought in regards
to the animals, today, muskrats are almost completely gone out
(46:33):
of Louisiana. They have been ecologically replaced by the invasive nutria.
In the last few years, less than four hundred muskrats
were trapped annually in the whole state, down from millions
one hundred years ago. Things are always changing and Wimpy
(46:54):
Serenai and Paul Leguard's family land on Delacroix Island, where
their families used to trap, are now almost completely underwater
as South Louisiana continues to sink. It's a wild story.
I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease Brins,
(47:15):
This Country Life and Lakes Backwoods University. Please leave us
a review on iTunes, share this podcast directly with a friend,
share it on social media. We thank you so much
for your support this Bear Grease feed and what we're
doing keep the wild places wild because that's where the
(47:37):
bears live.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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