During the time of the French, the vast prairies of present-day Southwest Louisiana remained mostly uncolonized. The only inhabitants consisted mainly of scattered bands of semi-nomadic Native Americans known as the “Atakapa” by the French colonial authorities. The Atakapa had a reputation of being cannibalistic and the word itself was a Choctaw epithet that meant “Eater of Men”. This reputation did not prevent a few adventurous Frenchmen from trading furs and horses with the Indigenous inhabitants of the prairies all the way to present-day Southeast Texas beginning in the 1720s. These early French traders also introduced ranching and cattle culture into South Louisiana.

The earliest known and most enigmatic of those French pioneers was André Masse, a native of Grenoble, France.He appears in the Louisiana historical record for the first time on a 1731 census table as a landowner near New Orleans. By the 1740s, evidence from cattle brands and an early Spanish map depicting his ranch reveal his presence in what was known as the Attakapas District. Significantly, Masse wasn’t the only permanent settler in the region. He was joined by over 20 enslaved Senegambians, Creoles and Native Americans who were responsible for taking care of his vast livestock. Long before the emergence of cotton,rice and sugar cane cultivation in Louisiana, The Masse slaves rode horses and herded livestock over large tracts of open land.

They were essentially cowboys;practicing a lifestyle Spanish and perhaps Senegalese in origins adapted to the prairies and terrain of southwest Louisiana. This lifestyle gave the Masse slaves a feeling of autonomy and freedom that differed dramatically from other forms of slave labor based on agriculture.  André Masse emancipated all of his slaves before his death in  1772 and gave them livestock and horses. The former Masse slaves acquired Spanish grants and settled near present-day Charenton, Louisiana in St. Mary Parish along the Bayou Teche. The freed Masse slaves formed the earliest Creole community of color in Southwest Louisiana and pioneered a local cowboy culture that persists to this day.

Joseph Cléopha STRAUSS- a legendary horse trainer in Carencro, Louisiana. He was a direct descendant of Léveillé MASSE, the earliest known free person of color in Southwest Louisiana.

– Rodney Sam