Swamps 

Swamps are areas where the land is under water all or part of the time.  Trees and shrubs can grow in swampy areas.   

Of Louisiana's extensive swamp areas (the Atchafalaya, the Lafourche Basin, and the area near Lake Maurepas), only the Atchafalaya floods annually.  As a result, this swamp is very supportive of wildlife.  The floods also help to produce and maintain natural levees -- ridges of higher land running from north to south -- within the swamp.  It was to these levees that some Cajuns moved. 

Increasingly severe floods in the mid-1800s made it difficult to grow cash crops and vegetable gardens on the ridges.  As a result, the Cajuns turned to the swamp and the nearby Gulf of Mexico to make their living, becoming hunters, trappers and fishermen.  They sold the seafood, wild game, and pelts they gathered in New Orleans and, eventually, other South Louisiana communities. 

The houses the Cajuns first built on the natural levees could not stand up to the force of repeated floods.  Eventually they adopted the practice of living on houseboats (a custom borrowed from Anglos in the upper portion of the Mississippi River system), which allowed them to live anywhere within the swamp. 

Boats provided the best transportation in this watery environment, so even before the adoption of the houseboat, boat ownership was imperative for these Cajuns.  Like the river/bayou Cajuns, they continued to refine their boat building tradition throughout the nineteenth century. 

Today most descendants of the swamp-dwelling Cajuns live outside the swamp and use motor-powered boats to reach their hunting and fishing grounds. 

Marshes 

Marshes are areas of soggy land covered by grasses.   In Louisiana, marshland is found in the southwest corner of the state paralleling the coast.   Like the Atchafalaya Swamp, the marsh has ribbons of high, dry land which can support settlement.  Called cheniers because oak trees grow upon them, these ridges run from west to east. 

At first, the isolation and insects associated with the marsh discouraged settlement there.  However, the prairie Cajuns soon learned that the area (although soggy) could support cattle.  Once they understood this fact, the ranchers began moving their herds to the marsh to graze during the winter months.  By the 1880s some Cajun ranchers were actually living within the marsh.   However, the population here has always been much lower than in other areas of Acadian and Cajun settlement within Louisiana.