Thought to be extinct for most of the 20th century due to over logging, recent sitings give hope that the the ivory billed woodpecker, code named Elvis by birders, still lives in areas of remote wetland forests. Fairy Lake, on the border between Texas and Louisiana, is one of the prime candidates for finding hidden pockets of this elusive creature.
I don’t now what they say about it in Louisiana, but on this side of the border, Fairy Lake is known as the only honest lake in Texas since it’s the only natural one in a state the size of France. That’s notable because the only honest character in True Blood goes there to meditate, but Hoyt calls it by its more common name, Caddo Lake.
Is it just me, or does the shape of the lake bear a resemblance to the Chinese dragon on the shirt Lafayette wore the day that Hoyt was at Fairy Lake and the day after Sookie discovered she was a fairy? Have I mentioned that Chinese dragons are associated with control over water, rain, and flooding?
Historically the area was a no man’s land, providing a buffer zone between English and French, then American and Spanish/ Mexican settlements and a haven for criminals, swindlers, rustlers, revolutionaries, societal outcasts, and a racially mixed population referred to as redbones. The shenanigans that were going on there led to a feud known as the Regulator-Moderator War, which I’ll mention again later. Promise. Basically, enough law abiding citizens finally got fed up with the lawlessness in no man’s land to form a vigilante army to keep order. Another group of vigilantes formed to keep the first group in check, and as you can imagine, the two didn’t see eye to eye on very much.
No one seems quite sure how Fairy Lake got its original name, but the spelling was changed to Ferry by the Corps of Engineers and later renamed for the Caddo Indians, a confederacy of farming tribes who were part of the mound building Mississippian culture. Even though they lived in the area for over a thousand years, the Caddoans’ relationship with the lake is difficult to understand. They only discovered the largest body of fresh water in the South in the 19th century. Tribal legend says that it was formed at that time during the New Madrid earthquakes. However, it’s now thought that the lake was formed centuries ago from flooding due to the the Great Raft, a thousand year old 160 mile log jam in the Red River, which prevented the river from draining into the Mississippi and rendered it impossible to navigate. Tree rings indicate Fairy Lake has existed at least for the past six hundred years.
At the dawn of steam power, riverboat captain Henry Miller Shreve, who became famous for boldly going in his steamship, the Enterprise, up the Mississippi River, where no man had gone before, designed a steamboat for clearing log jams. He was ordered by the US government to use his new steamboat, the Heliopolis, to disassemble the Great Raft, a task that took over 5 years. When the Red River was finally opened to boat travel, Shreve advised Congress to appropriate funds to keep the river clear of debris. They ignored him and in only three years, the river was again closed to shipping and the second Great Raft had to be disassembled to reopen it.
To take advantage of new commercial opportunities, a township formed on the Red River in Caddo parish at the head of where the Great Raft had once been; it was named Shreveport in honor of the captain who had made the town possible.
Today the metropolitan Shreveport-Bossier area straddles Caddo and De Soto parishes. The latter is named for the first European to explore the area. Hernando De Soto brought death and disease with him that decimated the native population. Oh, the irony! Remember De Soto’s Pharmacy on the way back from Mamaw’s Mud Bugs in Keatchie? It was the place of employment of Nancy Lavoir, a.k.a Ms. Jeanette. Tara lost her peace of mind there, and Lettie Mae didn’t get the relief from her physical suffering that she expected from a pharmacy. Remember kiddies, nothing good will come from an encounter with De Soto, so don’t believe all the false promises!
From the ridiculous, to the sublime. As unfitting as it is to name a pharmacy after Hernando de Soto, the city of Shreveport is ideally suited to Eric Northman. The word ‘shreve’ is an old form of ‘sheriff,’ so the vampire entrepreneur and lawman is based in a city named ‘Sheriff’s Port’ situated on the bank of the Red River that was founded on crass commercialism. That’s just so giving I’m not sure whether to point out that the Red River is a metaphor for the blood Eric survives on or that Fangtasia is a metaphorical port where tourists and fangbangers flow in, empty their pockets for the port authority, and flow out on a river of blood. How could it be more perfect? What if the lifeless looking brown river could only appear beautiful and glamorous it the moonlight.
While the removal of the Great Raft gave life to the Red River, it threatened to turn Fairy Lake into a swamp. A dam was built to preserve and protect what nature had created. However, liquid gold was soon discovered in the lake, and it became the site for the first underwater oil drilling operation in 1911. The lake was immediately exploited; derricks sprang up all over it. Howard Hughes, Sr., who made the family fortune with his rock eating drill head, tested it during the drilling at Caddo Lake.
The oil industry moved on and left the lake, but the battle between those who wished to protect Fairy Lake and those who wished to exploit it continued. Further ecological damage occurred when the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant was built on its shore, just outside of Karnack, Texas, the home of first lady and nature lover Ladybird Johnson. The exploitive nature of her relationship with LBJ was recently discussed at TBU.
Fairy Lake is the setting of the real life story of Harriet Moore Page Potter Ames. Her memoirs were fictionalized in Love is a Wild Assault. Soloman Page, Harriet’s first husband, left her and their two children to starve on an isolated Texas farm while he joined the Revolution.
After surviving on wild plants and selling nearly all of her prossessions, she and her children were rescued by the Secretary of the Texas Navy, Robert Potter. He lied to her, abducted her, and conned her to marry him even though she was still married to her first husband. He promised to introduce a bill into the state legislature that would make her first marriage invalid, so that she would not be a bigamist. They built a house on Fairy Lake, and Harriet had two more children.
For the second time, Harriet was left by a husband hell bent on fighting a war. Potter left his family to get involved in the Regulator-Moderator War. Unlike her first husband, he managed to get himself killed. When his newly made will was read, Harriet discovered that it made no mention of a wife or children and left their homestead to another woman. Harriet was referred to in the will as Mrs. Harriet Page, even though Potter had always assured her that Page had never been her legal husband. After years of litigation that went to the Texas Supreme Court, Harriet was eventually dispossessed of her beloved home on Fairy Lake.
Harriet’s story and the one of Fairy Lake and the ivory billed woodpecker seem especially evocative of season 3 of True Blood with Sookie just starting to realize Bill’s treachery, visiting the fairy pond, and learning that she is the rarest of all creatures and the object of a maniacal hunt.
*Photo of Caddo Lake courtesy of Crip’s Camp. **Caddo is one of the few lakes to have escaped development and is a UN protected wetland, but is far from the pristine wilderness it appears. Snakes found at Fairy Lake have the highest levels of mercury ever recorded in living wildlife. ****There is a long history of Bigfoot sightings at Fairy Lake. ***As the native populations dealt with the effects of colonization, the Caddo tribes found themselves on the wane. Remnants of other Mississippian tribes migrated into the area. The Choctaw, a subject of the TB Comic Books, were just such a reformulated tribe who, by the 19th century, had spread throughout Louisiana and Eastern Texas, including the area around Fairy Lake.
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