You Can Live Louisiana's Robust and Romantic History
Prehistoric Native Americans... adventuring explorers... silk-shirted plantation owners... priests and pirates... capitalists and cavalry... southern belles, gamblers, renegades and rogues: Louisiana has been the stage of a blazing historical drama colorful enough to rival that of many nations, and our historic landmarks keep those adventurous days very much alive. You can be an overnight guest in homes that routinely welcomed travelers a century or so ago, attend services in 200-year-old churches, talk politics in antebellum courthouses, sip mint juleps by the great red paddlewheel of a Mississippi steamboat. It's all still here... still functioning... still a vibrant part of the present.
The best-known chapters of the great saga of Louisiana, of course, are of the French and Spanish colonists called "Creoles" who founded New Orleans, the great steamboat races on the Mississippi, the state's rich plantation heritage and the settling of the bayou country by "Cajuns" from far-off Nova Scotia. But, like the Mississippi River, Louisiana never does anything simply. It always takes the scenic route, and there are always fascinating subplots: our Native Americans from prehistory through to the present, the African-Americans, the Spanish-speaking "Isleņos," the Germans and Slavs, the Italians and Irish. All of these and others shared and still share a state where there is room enough to celebrate their heritage and spirit enough to let it endure.
4,000 years of our Native American History
From prehistory onward Louisiana has been home to many Native American tribes, and their cultures endure, shaping our present. Basket weaving, carving, boat making, alligator skinning and many other crafts and traditions are demonstrated at many festivals across the state. Poverty Point State Historic Site, an hour from Monroe/West Monroe, is one of the nation's most significant archaeological finds, a complex of ceremonial mounds about three-quarters of a mile in diameter.
The Louisiana State Exhibit Museum in Shreveport houses an excellent collection of
Caddo, Coushatta, Choctaw and Chitimacha Indian artifacts. The Cabildo in New Orleans explores the relationship Native Americans had with settlers through all aspects of their daily lives. In Avoyelles Parish at Marksville, you'll find the Tunica-Biloxi Regional Indian Center and Museum, containing a long-buried collection of Indian/ European artifacts from Louisiana's colonial period, and the Marksville State Historic Site is an important archaeological site containing evidence of a 2000-year-old Native American culture.
Three miles north of the small town of Elton is the Coushatta Reservation. Exhibits at the Coushatta Tribe Visitors Center feature tribal history, and dancing demonstrations can be arranged with advance notice.
