Kisatchie National Forest: Louisiana's Only National Forest

Louisiana has one national forest. Its name is Kisatchie, from a Caddo word that translates approximately as something like long cane or place of long cane reeds. It covers approximately six hundred thousand acres spread across seven units in north and central Louisiana, and it holds within its boundaries more than three centuries of overlapping French, Spanish, and eventually American colonial history compressed into a landscape most visitors drive through without stopping.

The Kisatchie Hills Wilderness, in the Kisatchie Ranger District, contains the most dramatic terrain in Louisiana, a low plateau of flatrock and hardwood forest over sandstone that the state's other terrain, flat and low-lying, does not prepare visitors to expect. The Longleaf Trail traverses this area, and in spring the wildflower diversity in the open pine flatwoods is comparable to that of the more celebrated longleaf landscapes further east.

The Caddo people, whose name the forest's water system carries, occupied the Red River valley and its tributaries for centuries before Spanish explorers arrived in the sixteenth century. The French claimed Louisiana in sixteen eighty-two, the Spanish took it in seventeen sixty-two, France retook it in eighteen hundred, and the United States purchased it three years later. The sequence of colonial transfers that ended with Louisiana becoming American territory ran through Caddo territory without ever consulting the Caddo about the transaction. The Caddo Nation is now headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma, where their ancestors were removed in the nineteenth century.

The forest was established in nineteen thirty as Louisiana's first and only national forest. The question of why Louisiana has only one, given the size of its timber-producing pine forests, is a matter of land ownership history, timber-company political influence, and decisions made by the Forest Service in the early twentieth century.