CHAPTER I

THIS is a story of an empire carved in wood. Mostly, it is a story of the men who did the carving; so, mostly, it is the Goodyear Story.

     They came late, these men dreaming the urgent, restless dreams of accomplishment and of pyramiding wealth. They were long finding their new and abundant virgin forest treasure, though its southernmost boundary was scarcely fifty miles from New Orleans. The southeastern Louisiana country where they found it had, in the beginning, been Choctaw country. The Choctaw Indians, hostile and shrewd, had guarded it long and well and, when they left, they left it as they had found it -- a forest wilderness of magnificent expanse, its riches waiting to be tapped.

     Here there had been game. And the Choctaws had taken from its plenty. Here there were swift-moving streams and rivers; slow-moving bayous flanked by moss-draped oaks and by cypress trees, their trunks bulging to the height of a man before tapering into even growth. And from these waters, the Choctaws had taken fish.

     But there was more. Merchantable timber. Thousands of acres of longleaf yellow pine. It was there even until this century. Who before had counted its treasure? Who had yet recognized the full measure of its riches?

     At first, except for the ripples made by jumping fish or the splash of an alligator sliding on its belly into the dark waters, the bayous wound serenely and undisturbed toward the Gulf of Mexico. Later some of that serenity vanished. The westward migration of the Choctaws and the arrival of the earliest settlers overlapped, violently more often than not. Even after the Louisiana Legislature created Washington Parish in the heart of this forest domain, the Choctaws still were terrorizing prospective pioneers as fast as they appeared on the scene.

     Governor Claiborne more than once wondered whether their hostility possibly was encouraged by the English and the Spaniards. A few hardy settlers did come for a hundred different reasons, and some of them stayed. But they changed the land little. Still other pioneers of another sort who

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came much later found the forests almost as they had been in the days of the Choctaws.

     Forests of pine blanketed the land for miles in every direction. Part of the deep green foliage turned brown in the winters and fell to the ground, making a thick carpet of pine needles that smothered the underbrush. Travel by horseback or wagon was impeded only by an occasional fallen tree. Here, then, was untouched, exposed wealth like gold above ground. It was ripe for plucking; and, as was inevitable, it was plucked.

     There had been many settlements of Choctaws in southeastern Louisiana. One of them was an encampment along a creek called Bogue Lusa (Dark Waters). Bogue Lusa Creek flowed eastward into Pearl River through that part of the land which in 1819 became the Parish* of Washington, lying hard against the boundary which is the end of the State of Louisiana and the beginning of the State of Mississippi.

     In the autumn of 1905, there was a second encampment along Bogue Lusa Creek long after the Choctaws had moved to the Oklahoma reservation. This time it was white men come from a great distance who rode all day in surreys through the pine forests from the hamlet of Mandeville, directly across the shallow waters of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. This time it was adventurers from the North led by the Goodyear brothers, Frank and Charles, already past middle age.

     The rainy season was over so their horses did not bog crossing Bogue Chitto Swamp in the Pearl River watershed. At the end of a ride which started before daybreak, these tired adventurers swam in Bogue Lusa Creek and then pitched their tents along its banks. Where they slept, Panfilo de Narvaez and his band of gold-seekers on one of the earliest expeditions of white men had, in 1528, skirmished with the Choctaws, not without heavy losses. Where they slept, the flags of many lands had flown: the fleur-de-lis of France, the Union Jack, the banner of Castile and Aragon, and for seventy-four days the blue-and-silver Lone Star of the Florida Republic of 1810.

     While this territory was under the banner of Castile and Aragon and was called West Florida, the Spanish had offered land grants. There were a few early settlers, some of Spanish blood, who were willing to risk the

*The parishes of Louisiana are analogous to the counties of other states. Many maintain that the parish of today had its origin in the Spanish ecclesiastical subdivisions.

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challenge of the redskins. Later there were those of English origin who began migrating from the Atlantic Seaboard when France ceded West Florida to England. Most of these pioneers came from the Carolinas and Virginia by way of Kentucky and Tennesee (sic).

     And there were others, some of obscure origin, who wandered in and squatted on the land without rights of ownership. There were among these frontiermen (sic) refugees from justice, men who chose to live in a wilderness beyond reach of the law rather than risk their necks in a hangman's noose. There were nomadic families in search of new homes outside the boundaries of civilization.

     The United States later recognized the early land grants as well as the acreage which had been taken over without formal title by the pioneers. These areas were generally of irregular shape and were near streams where clear water was accessible. Shallow and artesian wells were unknown to them. The parcels of land which the early settlers acquired without consideration usually comprised about 640 acres and were listed in the land records of the government as "headrights." As an inducement to further settlement of the parishes, homestead rights to 160 acres were granted by the United States Government. After five years, the settler became the owner. In 1880, the government offered to sell its holdings in what at this time was rural Louisiana for $1.25 an acre. Despite these efforts to attract new settlers, the number of inhabitants in Washington Parish increased mostly by the growth of family trees rather than by a population influx. There was no large migration into the parish like that of the Acadians from Nova Scotia into the Teche country of southwestern Louisiana, land of the legend of Evangeline.

     In fact there was little in the wilderness of Washington Parish to encourage immigration. There were no railroads to transport the natural resources of the land for great distances and there were no nearby industrial centers for ready markets. The better families, those who were destined ultimately to play a part in the development of the land of their birth or of their choice, made the best of what they had.

     Transportation was crude, either by horseback or ox-drawn wagons. The produce of the land was hauled to scanty markets in Franklinton, the parish seat, or to Covington in St. Tammany Parish, thirty miles away. Occasionally, cattle were driven overland on the hoof to Lake Pontchar-

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train and forced to swim across the Rigolets and Chef Monteur to New Orleans. There was little money in circulation, and few people in the parish at the turn of the century lived in more than simple abundance.

The second encampment on the banks of Bogue Lusa Creek in the autumn of 1905 was to change all this; it was to mark the beginning of a new era, a new way of life, in the Parish of Washington. Go to Chapter II