Subject: RE: Question about Lakes of Pontchartrain song
From:
PoppaGator
Date: 17 May 12 - 04:38 PM
My theory has always been that the song was "written by," or (perhaps more likely) based upon letters sent home to Ireland by, one of the many Irish immigrants who came to New Orleans in the 1830s to work on the construction of the New Basin Canal, which ran from the shore of Lake Pontchartrain south into the heart of the city, to a turning basin near the current-day site of Union Passenger Terminal. This route includes a section of today's Interstate highway 10.
This year is the 175th anniversry if the completion of that Canal, and was commemmorated by the Irish Channel St Patrick's Day Marching Club earlier this year, because the construction of the canal is so central to the history of Irish people in New Orleans.
The work of digging the canal was perilous because of the near-certainty of contracting "yellow fever" (malaria) in the swampy environment. The Irish immigrants who made up most of the workforce died in great numbers: in fact, mathematically, an individual actually stood a better chance of survival back home in famine-struck rural Ireland than working on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
Immigrants were hired for the work largely because of the risk of disease ~ local slaveowners refused to put their human property at risk by loaning slaves out to the canal project. Local working-class folks, of course, were also understandably reluctant to hire on.
In latter years, we have learned that native Louisianans, whether black or white, slave or free, could have done the work safely enough due to immunity; anyone who had survived childhood in this area was ipso facto safe from the most serious effects of mosquito bites. Conversely, ALL the European immigrants working on the project (mostly, but not exclusively, Irish) were quite vulnerable to deadly disease.
New Orleans was the #1 port of embarkation for immigrants from Ireland for several years in the 1830s-40s, the time of the first Great Potato Famine, largely because of the promise of work on the New Basin Canal. Because the deadly effects of Yellow Fever became so well known to the folks left behind, subsequent immigration from Ireland to the US avoided New Orleans "like the plague" (literally!), and concentrated almost exclusively on other US ports, mostly in the northeast (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.)
If this theory is true, the "foreign money" would NOT have been Confederate ~ the canal-building project predated the Civil War by 10-15 years. Still in all: back in the 1830s, there was NOT a uniform monetary system in the US ~ banknotes (paper money) were issued by individual banks, and it may have been difficult to negotiate bills from a New Orleans bank in Mississippi (or even in Jackson, Louisiana).
New Orleans was nominally "American" in those days not long after the Louisiana Purchase, but it was still culturally French and Spanish, and multi-lingual; the ten-dollar bills issued by some local banks bore the French word "DIX" for ten ~ many surmise that this is the origin of the terms "Dixie"/"Dixieland." It makes sense that English-speaking Mississippians might consider such currency to be "foreign."
Swamps hereabouts are generally fairly densely wooded, mostly with cypress trees. It is not unreasonable that anyone, local or immigrant, might refer to gator habitat as "the woods."
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sj
