Bayou Teche: The Oldest Road

Three thousand to four thousand years ago, Bayou Teche was the main channel of the Mississippi River. The great river moved, as it periodically does, switching its course when sediment built up enough to make a shorter path to the sea. What was left behind was a hundred and twenty-five miles of slow, winding water cutting through south-central Louisiana, through parishes of live oak and Spanish moss and sugarcane.

The name itself is disputed. One tradition links it to a Chitimacha word meaning "snake," for the bayou's serpentine bends. Another connects it to the German word Deutsch, pointing to early German colonial settlers. The water does not care about etymology. It simply winds.

When the Acadians arrived in the seventeen sixties, Bayou Teche was their primary highway. There were no roads. The water took them south from the Atchafalaya River, through the landscape that would become their home. Later, steamboats ran its length, carrying cotton and sugar to market. Two Civil War naval engagements happened on this bayou, Union gunboats trading fire with the Confederate vessel the J. A. Cotton; the Cotton was later burned by Confederates to keep it from capture.

The bayou flows through St. Martinville, through New Iberia, through a string of small towns that still measure distance by the water and not the road. Rice farmers draw irrigation from it. Kayakers run it on weekends.

It has been here longer than any human name for this place. It will be here after the last name is forgotten.