Hi Alice in 2010!

I popped over here after seeing that your newer thread had been quickly closed. I'm sure you've noticed by now that there is a "T" in "Pontchartrain."

I am absolutely convinced that this song has to have had its origins in the 1830s, when the first wave of 19th-century famine in Ireland drove so many immigrants to the US ~ specifically, to New Orleans, where plenty of unskilled labor was available digging the New Basic Canal, which would run from Lake Pontchartrain several miles into the center of town.

Most of the laborers were immigrants, mostly Irish, and huge numbers died of Yellow Fever. The word got back to Ireland that New Orleans was a very dangerous desitination, and subsequent waves of immigration from Ireland very consciously avoided Louisiana.

Since Irish folk came to this area only during this relatively brief period, and since they worked so close to the lakeshore, AND since the song is about the only example within the Irish-traditional repertoire that includes any reference to the New Orleans area, I'm sure that there must be some connection.

Whoever wrote it probably either hurried back home to Ireland before he'd die of a tropical disease, or perhaps was an Irishman who stayed home and culled the setting and other refences from letters received from friends and family who had left him behind. There are several clearly mistaken geographical bits (for starters, there's only one Lake Pontchartrain, not plural "lakes"), which might support the idea of the author writing from across the ocean based on his understanding of correspondence from Louisiana. However, even a person right on the scene might not have had an accurate big-picture map in his mind. God only knows how confusing it must have been to be up to one's knees in a swamp, in the middle of an epidemic!