00:00:05 Speaker 1: The stretch that the fought. The battle was taken is by a mile. So the boat was going and they was with the machine gun and the people from Delhiphot were shooting over the level, you know, just shooting the shot gun, the rifles whatever they had. Yeah, a lot of them with bird shot, lot on wood buckshot would kill the machine gun man. I don't know. I guess just just shot them up with the way I understand. The mortar was all shot up the boat. The cabin on the boat was all shot up with bullet holes. I guess that's what I could see, you know. 00:00:41 Speaker 2: On this episode, we're getting into the nitty gritty details of the November nineteen twenty six one day. It is Laanio's Trappers War in South Louisiana over muskrat trapping rights. We'll hear from two men whose fathers were involved in the war. But a bigger question to me is why is this region of the country known for producing corrupt leaders? And is that even a fair question? This is a look into human nature when it's corrupted by power and muskrats. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one. And for anyone new to the bear Grease Feed. We have multiple podcasts on this feed, bear Grease, The Render, Brent's Country Life and Lake Pickles Backwoods University. The complexity can be daunting, but the good times just keep rolling. I hope you enjoyed this episode. My name is klay Nukem and this is the bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places and where will tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. We established in the last episode the culture of the Islamios trappers camps on Delacroix Island in Louisiana in the nineteen twenties and how muskrat soared in value, making formerly almost worthless swampland extremely valuable. This is Placamine Parish's Paul Legard. 00:02:46 Speaker 3: In those days, there wasn't no you owned this piece of land, and now the guy I owned up. It was all opened priory. It was just like Wild West. And when you know when a story at the beginning of the season, you went out Dan, you picked out spot and you put your trap on out and people honored each other's areas. You know. You said. That went on for a few years, and the politicians got involved with it, but what they wanted to do was take a percentage away from each trapper, and they wouldn't go for it. People have been trapping at Landfa at that time almost one hundred and fifty years, you know, and now they had camps. People used to build camps in the priory for they could. The whole family went out there and uh in some cases, and they spent the winter, you know, trapping, and the women were cooking to take care of as far as the men we're in up properly working well. They pushed them on those camps and they brought in trappers from West Louisiana are Texas. They brought in own trappers and put them into camps. 00:04:06 Speaker 2: What Paul is calling the prairie is what I understand to be Swampland the people who had trapped here for one hundred and fifty years were getting pushed out by the politicians bringing in trappers from the outside. They'd been double crossed by one of their own, a man named Leander Perez, who had become the chairman of the Trappers Association. He was also a judge in Plaquemine Parish. But when he saw an opportunity to make a bunch of money, he pushed out his own people and brought in new trappers that played by his rules, paid more money for the trapping leases, and sold the furs to him. The Islanos were not gonna take this from Perez. Here's what they did to the new trappers that were now in their old camps. 00:04:55 Speaker 3: My grandfather told them that those camps were not but more or less a platform. They build a big platform and they put a top paper shack around it, and he said they they're waiting a gang of fellas, not one guy, but a bunch of fellaws. Would wait until say ten o'clock in the morning, when all the men were out in the in the prairie trapping, and they go and they take tell them, women, take all your stuff and make it. They told us they didn't try to hurt those people because they were working people, just like they were. They make them take everything out the camp, their supplies, their beds there, whatever they had, and they you know, they had fifteen twenty guys. They picked that camp. I'm trying to buy the whole camp. We're going to buy you. So when that happened, they brought into Texas Rangers to protect them, and uh, that's when the real trouble started. 00:05:53 Speaker 2: The real trouble started as Perez hired mercenaries to kill and intimidate the eslonos. I'm trying to make sense of how trapping muskrats could bring a community to bloodshed. We're not talking about gold or black dirt, farmland or oil, but a rat. We've been backed into a corner here, folks, We've got to talk just a little bit about muskrats. 00:06:19 Speaker 1: My name is Martin Cooker. 00:06:21 Speaker 4: I work for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fishers in Parks and I currently serve as the Nuisance Species program Bologist and also the Furbearer Program Bologist. 00:06:32 Speaker 2: This guy is a muskrat expert. 00:06:34 Speaker 4: A rare breed, but the muskrat is in the rodent family, native to the US and Canada. In the US, it has at least fourteen different subspecies Virginia, Rocky Mountain, the Oregon Coast, Nevada, the Great Plains, So there are subspecies really depending on location, they're going to be about nine fourteen inches long with a with a tail anywhere from seven to twelve inches, so you're talking about twenty four twenty six inches head to the end of the tail. 00:07:03 Speaker 1: They're going to weigh. 00:07:03 Speaker 4: Anywhere from like a pounds and a half to four and a half pounds. Muskrats weren't really seeing that much in Louisiana until like the late eighteen hundreds, especially like in the coastal parishes. One of the things that they put forth is that the decline in alligators due to hunting and with the burning of the marshes to locate the alligators, and also with the reduction in minx, all were linked to the muskrat increase. Now, after that the predators were gone away, the habitat's gone up, and then the mush rats appeared in the millions. It was just like a population explosion. It was an article in the nineteen oh two in the New York Times. The headline was the muskrat is the principal fur producer in America. There was a quote from the I think the Fort Worth Star in nineteen oh eight in this stated that Louisiana has the largest fur trade in the world, all right, And that now that is verifiable if you go back and look at the records in Louisiana was the fur trapping capital of the US fourth it was more first coming from Louisiana anywhere else. 00:08:12 Speaker 2: The muskrat trade peaked around nineteen twenty five, when they were worth a dollar thirty each and a good trapper could catch as many as one hundred and fifty day, yielding thousands of dollars during the seventy five day season, and several millions of dollars worth of muskrat firs were flowing through Placamine Parish alone. I could see Steve Ranella wanting to get in on that. Here is Wimpy Serenae. He's eighty four years old and was raised on Delacroix Island in the trapping camps. He's going to take us right into the One Day War. 00:08:52 Speaker 1: What happened with Perez in that it was long before parting, you know, get out, but uh, Perez gathered up cagunes from the west part of Louisiana, Texans gunslingers at that time, it was really gun slingers, and he formed like a little army. He monitored a machine gun on oyster board. I think it was either boat. You know. What happened before they attacked the people from Dinna crew found out about it, that they were planning this thing. Matter of fact, my dad used to have relatives in what they called Kinnharven and uh, these Texans and that was hanging around the ballrooms there, you know, and you heard overheard them saying, we're gonna make some Spanish shop. Body these jokes down here, you know. Yeah, so they found out about that day. 00:09:51 Speaker 2: Who was your dad involved in finding out about it? 00:09:55 Speaker 1: Yeah, he found out about it, and I guess other people did too, because they had relatives in Knoven And this is what these guys used to hang on when they was starting to get together, you know, and going to barrooms in that and I guess they talked and sort of people from Della Cruill find out that they will come in. 00:10:15 Speaker 2: After almost one hundred years, the people from Delacroix Island still recalled the words that started this war and maybe saved their lives. They overheard someone saying that they were going to make some Spanish soup. And if you remember, the Islanios were originally from the Canary islands off the coast of Spain. So this region, this island, they spoke Spanish. Here's filmmaker David Dubos who made the film Delta Justice, the Islanios trappers. 00:10:44 Speaker 5: War word filtered down from They got into a bar not too far from where the Islanians were, and it was literally just guys bragging in a bar that they were going to go down to Ela Crow and make Spanish soup out of the Islanios and just loud, drunken stupidity and arrogance, and was overheard. And they went back and told them what was happening, and you know that was it. 00:11:15 Speaker 2: So this this gunboat with these Texas Rangers, this machine gun mounted on the boat come down, comes down the bayou. There's a levee, yeah, which is like a damn that's keeping the bayou from going into the onto the land. And behind the levee is the Islanio's houses. 00:11:33 Speaker 5: Right. 00:11:34 Speaker 2: Author Glenn Jeanson estimated there to be four hundred armed Islanios on the levee waiting on this gun boat when it arrived. The machine gun was essentially a gatling gun like on a World War two boat, and the captain of the boat was J. H Asher, a former Texas ranger from Dallas. They had no idea they were going to be met with resistance. They thought they were just going to take the boat down the bayou and just splattered the Islaono's camps with rounds from that machine gun. Who knew these people were so passionate about muskrats. 00:12:11 Speaker 1: And the way I understand it, they moneled the machine gun on the boat, and so they monited and they came up what they called gentility. It was, you know, the island, like I said, with the with the machine gun and all of the Texans in that. But the people from down there was ready. So they got their shot gun. There was a levee whe whether if you go down there, you can see the road is on the levee the highway, and it was a higher levee than what it is today because everything's singing, but anyway, it was much higher. So they got behind the limit with the shot and guns and whatever guns that they had, and when they made the turn into the Bayer Terra buff you know, they started with the machine gun, but they also went I got back up a little bit. It took the machine gun the night before and set it to shoot over the levee, over the bank, you know, to buying the bank. But what happened when they attacked the next morning, the tide went down. 00:13:18 Speaker 5: So they had to fix the machine gun, but it couldn't reach the Islanios because. 00:13:23 Speaker 2: They couldn't angle upwards correct. 00:13:26 Speaker 5: So they were kind of stuck. 00:13:28 Speaker 3: You know. 00:13:28 Speaker 5: They tried to get it up and hang it up, but that those things were enormously heavy. And then you're in the line of fire too. 00:13:35 Speaker 1: You have to remember that. So so when they couldn't adjust it, that machine gun like the dude and did it kind of so when they would shoot, it was hitting the levee instead of hitting the people because the tide went down, and so they would hit the bank. So, you know, they didn't the machine gun didn't do them too much good. And of Coastal had the other people with their pistols and guns and what have you, and they started that they wore right there and they they shot up the the machine gun boat. They killed the the only one was killed, the gun, the guy that was running the machine gun boat. You know, quite a few guns, quite a few guns. 00:14:22 Speaker 5: Well. 00:14:22 Speaker 1: The stretch that the fought the battle was taken is about let's see, about a mile, so you know where where the battle took place, where they was at, where they were. 00:14:33 Speaker 2: Set shooting that whole mile down the canal this gun ship. 00:14:37 Speaker 1: As to what our vision, the boat was going, and they was with the machine gun and the people from Delapert were shooting over the level, you know, just shooting. They shot guns and rifles whatever they had. Yeah, you know, because a lot of them had just shotguns, you know, a lot of them with bird shot, a lot of them with buckshot, you know, and would killed the machine gun man. 00:15:02 Speaker 5: I don't know. 00:15:03 Speaker 1: I guess just just shot them up with the way I understand that the mortar was all shot up the boat. The cabin on the boat was all shining up with bullet holes. I guess that's what I could see. 00:15:14 Speaker 3: You know. 00:15:14 Speaker 2: Yeah, the man who was killed, Sam Galland, was reported by the coroner they had seventeen bullet holes in his body. 00:15:27 Speaker 5: But these leios had, you know, the trajectory sort of like a forty five degree trajectory angle on that boat where they could just fire away. And yeah, they wounded several of them and killed one. But yeah, that's like you're literally walking into a I mean, I don't know what you would call them. In the military. Sometimes in these wars, they you know, you get trapped like that, you're just you just just no way out. 00:15:54 Speaker 2: So you have studied about this and talked to all these different people, who do you think fired the first shot? 00:16:02 Speaker 5: Probably the Islanios. Probably they weren't gonna sit there and let them fire a machine gun at him. 00:16:09 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:16:10 Speaker 5: One, only one person was killed, one Texas ranger whose last name was Gowland, Sam Gowland. He was the one operating the machine gun. The other ones were driven away and they went looking for Perez. They were going to kill him. That's how angry they were, as you can imagine. And Perez escaped and managed to get out of town literally by getting over into New Orleans and getting out of the parish. 00:16:39 Speaker 2: Was Perez wasn't on the boat though. 00:16:42 Speaker 5: No, he was not, of course not. No, those were his hired guns. Literally, he was nowhere near the boat. He's not gonna get his hands dirty, He's not going to get shot at. And I'm sure he had people around him protecting him. 00:17:00 Speaker 1: It was your dad. 00:17:01 Speaker 2: There was your father there. 00:17:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, he was there, yea. And like I was seeing my dad had went to something happened, and I don't know what it was. I just told these things that these Texans and gunsling as well. When they started getting shot at, they started running through the march and they shot him up, you know, but they didn't kill them all. And they got all shot up, and one of them was coming swimming across the bay. And this is when I'm one of the incident. I was told and a friend of my dad they said, look, that's the guy that tried to beat you up and off in the couch. And uh, my dad had an Elsie Smith shot double shotgun and I didn't know, but he had it in the in our attic and he never did use it. I used to go up there and I could see it and the stock was cracked, you know. And somebody else told me that my dad hit that guy with the stock of a shotgun and they broke the stock. Oh wow, And I remember the shotgun. It was an old Elsie Smith and the stock was broken. 00:18:10 Speaker 2: Paul told me the same story about Whimpy's dad breaking a gun stock off one of the boatman's heads. Here is Paul with an unusual story of a first hand account from a man on the boat involving a wild coincidence with the dog and a guy named to What's Yep to What's. 00:18:37 Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you another little story of cut fits right into this. My daddy used to buy crabs before he died. My daddy died when he was thirty eight years old. I was fifteen fifteen is on when he died, and we used to go to old on Highway eleven. They had a family over there. They were s stands. The old man was Pete and he had a son that was Pete. One of them was towards uh old man, Old Man Pete. His daddy was on the boat when they shot it up. Like I said, those people had no education and they looked to make a dollar whatever they could make a dollar. And he wasn't from Dela Crown. But they come there the trap. When the trapping was good, they stayed. He said, well, some kind of way he got mixed up and got on that boat. He must They must have gave him a job, that can of whatever, and he got on that boat. And he told me, he said, when they started shooting that boat, the cast net LEDs were bouncing off, And I asked him, said the cast that they said, Yeah, they take a cast net ledge. It's got a whole clean through it, you know, the castle. Yeah, And they had smashed the end of that and they put that in the shotgun shell he said. He said, the cast that LEDs were bouncing off. He said, But them steel jackinson, them rifle shells was going clean through red boat. And it wasn't no steel boat late they had. There was a wood boat, he said. And he said, what happened, he was sleeping on the other side of the motor away. It happened early in the morning. He's sleeping on the other side of the motor and he said, three or four of them Texas Rangers jumped on top of him, trying to get away from getting behind that motor you said, getting trying to get away from there. And uh, well, let me back up a minute. We used to go over there and buy crabs. We'd buy crabs or fifty two pounds hamp of crabs for four dollars of hamper number ones and uh but anyway, we were over there buying him and old man, old man Pete was there. He had a bunch of old cars and trucks stuff. You know junk, and they had a dog in there, and that dog come out wanting to eat or something. He told, told that dog, go let down. Dog. The doge went it was button back and laid down. And he told me saying, no, that dog is now I can't remember exiety. It was sixteen at eighteen years old, he said, I've been having that dog a long time, the old dog. We went in the house, he told told a story about that being behind that mode and them Texas rangers and all jumping on top of him and all. And when we come out of there to leave, that dog was dead. I'll never forget that the dog was laying their dead. He died. Why he told that story. 00:21:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's odd the things you remember that seemed completely disconnected. But I think these are mechanisms in our mind to help us remember the important stuff. Like an eighteen year old dog dying while the man was telling you about being on the gun ship. That's just odds. What I'm here for, Paul, good story here is wimpy. I'm trying to understand, like how the thing could escalate to where lander Perez was willing. 00:22:13 Speaker 1: To kill people? 00:22:15 Speaker 3: Yeah, how did that? 00:22:16 Speaker 1: How does that happen. The only thing I can understand is that he told these guys, all these people that he's hired, Look, uh, we have to take care of the people at Dental Croil, and you're going to have the all this trapping lands and you can trap it as long as you give me a percentage of whatever you're catching all that, and you're going to have the land instead of instead of and we got to run them all and even if we have to kill Wow. 00:22:42 Speaker 2: That was so he just had that that strong of an iron fist. He was isolated enough down in the deep Delta that he just thought, I can I can do anything. 00:22:55 Speaker 1: That's why I kind of consider him a dictator. You know, he had that Powell and he thought he can just do anything until he faced the people from Golacron. What about his. 00:23:09 Speaker 2: Reputation here, Like if you were to go on the street, like when we drove here, we drove down. 00:23:16 Speaker 1: Perez Drive, Yeah, in the Pere Rive, well, a lot of the politicians were with you in Saint Benod. 00:23:27 Speaker 2: Perez Drive was named after Leander Perez in nineteen sixty nine, but in the late nineteen nineties, after history had kind of showed who this guy was and had judged him. The name of the road was changed to be named after a more likable judge named Melvin Perez, so it remains Perez Drive. It's just a different Perez. What tell me how your dad handled the trappers war? So he he is actually there on the levee with a gun, did he? He didn't view that it's like something real honorable that he had done, like he had defended his people. Or was it just kind of like something he didn't want to talk about. 00:24:15 Speaker 1: Right, He didn't talk about it too much. I guess he felt like it was survival. He had to fight to savive. 00:24:23 Speaker 2: Like it wasn't a cool story to him, like today it was today one hundred years later, we're like, wow. 00:24:29 Speaker 1: Wow, this is what happened. Oh, it wasn't. It wasn't no big honor or nothing like that. It was just something that he had to do that he didn't want to do, but he had to do it to savive. Isn't either kill or be killed. 00:24:43 Speaker 2: It's interesting in the history because it's real easy to like kind of glorify something good and bad one hundred years later, and but back in the day, we might have thought this was the least interesting thing that ever happened. We're just like this is a bad thing, Like this shows kind of the the evil of mankind. What what do you think about that? 00:25:03 Speaker 1: Uh? I think about what a person with power would try to do to maintain that power. That would be land a parath even if he had to kill to do any he did it. That's how I look at it. As far as a lot of people liked land in Parrett, but I couldn't cry. 00:25:26 Speaker 2: It's it's kind of wild to think about people having a right trying to kill each other over a muskrat, right, you know that's today. 00:25:36 Speaker 1: You look at it, man and people killed him something or mushkranchy a well living you know, you had to survive. 00:25:48 Speaker 2: Here's a simple version of how the conflict reached its final resolution. It involved a guy named Manuel Malaro that was in Islanias. So the people went to Manuel Malario. He was an educated man with money, successful, They said, can you help us? He buys the lane? 00:26:09 Speaker 1: Right he and what does he do? He just wanted to In other words, he was a good businessman. Also, let's face that, you know. So what he did is he went and where and formed Delacrat Corporation named it after Delacrot, and he bought it, and then people would trap for him because he would buy it afar. Delacro Corporation would buy it afar. Okay, Okay, Like I said, he's a businessman, you know, true businessman. So he buys all this land. Okay, okay, this is the only way I can do it. You know, I'll buy the land we bought it from. I got it. I don't. I wouldn't know, but I'd have to think that he had to make some kind of arrangement with Leeann the Reds. But talking to his granddaughter, they hated land the press, you know, and I thought, wow, how can he buy this land when out going through the dictator of Plagamin Parish. I couldn't answer that. But he didn't buy it, and then he sold it to the trappers, the people from Delacrow. 00:27:22 Speaker 2: So he sold the land back to them. He didn't lease it to him. 00:27:27 Speaker 1: No, we could some of them. Some people didn't buy land, but they're all. Even if you bought the land, you had to sell you for the Delacrat Corperation. 00:27:39 Speaker 2: So Malario ended up being the good guy. The only difference between he and Perez is that he was fair in his dealings with the Islanos. But I think we have got to take a closer look at Leander Perez. He was born in eighteen ninety one and Placuamine Parish and raised in a wealthy Catholic family. Graduated from lsu with the Law in nineteen fourteen at the age of twenty three, and was appointed judge of Plaquemine Parish by his cousin in nineteen nineteen. Early on, he was accused of being corrupt. An example of that corruption he once scheduled as judge. He scheduled seven murder cases to be tried on the same day. All of the accused were murderers involved in the illegal trade of liquor. They were bootleggers, and it's alleged that Leander Perez wanted to protect them. As I understand it, all of them were acquitted because of the shortness of the trial. That's pretty slick if you're wanting to be corrupt. Then later in nineteen twenty three, while he was still really young, there was an impeachment petition charged against him to impeach him as judge, and there were twenty three specific charges against him that included a bunch of stuff. But one of them on the list was that he had a pearl handled revolver on his person during court hearings. People didn't like that. Another one was that he used county money to take people to the restaurants of his friends, avoiding his political enemies who owned restaurants. That's interesting, but most of them involved finances. He would ultimately be acquitted when he and this is when he was a young man, which empowered him even more for the rest of his life. He kind of got away with it and he thought, I will do whatever I want in this place, and he did. But what he would become most known for was his stance on racial issues. But as with all people, everyone had a different opinion of Leander Perez. Here's Paul, I've read a book about Leander Perez. You knew the man or met him? 00:29:56 Speaker 1: Yeah, quite a few times. 00:29:58 Speaker 2: He perceived around here. Is he a hero or is he a vig? 00:30:01 Speaker 3: They don't even know him no more. 00:30:03 Speaker 5: Uh. 00:30:05 Speaker 3: I think he was a I think basically he was a good man. He uh he was a segregationist completely and he ran that parish with a pretty stiff hand. But it was a good parish. It was a uh it was well, it was the wealthiest. It was the wealthiest parish in the United States. 00:30:28 Speaker 2: He kind of had the reputation of being like a crooked politician. 00:30:32 Speaker 3: I mean, uh yeah, I said, hey, well crook, I say, all of them will crooked. It was like the cowboys days down here. And but they had good points to him too, you know, they claim he was he was such a bad man with the black people. I had a buddy of mine, he me and he was in army together, went through basic training and all but friends, all, you know, till he died. And he told he was in the ballroom down there, and when day his motor had broke down in his boat. He's oyster fisherman and his motor has broken his boat. And the ballrooms down there had had imaginary line running through the middle of them. The white people stood on one side and the black people stood on the other side. And he was in the ballroom by the bar, and Leanda Press walked in and he asked him. He said, Paul, what now, what's the matter? You're not working? You wanted he wanted a burdy working when people making a living for himself, and he said, well, my motor's broken. My boat, Judge, he says, I can't work. He said, right now until I can make some money and get another motor. And uh he told me, he said, Paul, he said, go up to Donovan that was the main place where you got your motives and all up in the city. He said, put get your the motor you need and put it on my charge account. He said, but I want you to pay me. He said, you're come and pay me. He said, okay, judge. 00:31:55 Speaker 2: So and this this, Paul, this is the guy that you knew, Yeah, when I was in army and he was the black guy. 00:32:01 Speaker 3: Black yeah, yeah, a fine boy, fine man. He wasn't no boy. He was a man, a piece of man too. But anyway, yeah, he uh, he had a lot. He had He had everybody. Everybody's got good and bad in him. You know, it's what's good to one personally be bad for somebody else. Looking at a situation, when did you meet Leander Press When I was a child, a kid, fourteen twelve, fourteen, fifteen years old, Leander Peret brought the first charlet bull from Mexico in here and he sent an oyster boat with the with the they had pens on oyster boat. The whole oyster's on the deck. They put the pens up and went down there and got him a bull and he brought it to Idle Wall that's on the other side of the river. That was his his place on the other side of the river. And old man the Bella took us. I can remember him taking this there and the judge was sitting on the front porch and he all at the judge, he said, well, look at the boat. Yeah, right back then look at it like that big, big animal. Boy. You know what he had asked you. You caught you on the street being good. Oh boy, you're being good? Oh boy, yeah, judge, you know you'd asked if he was being good. 00:33:18 Speaker 2: You know, that was the time when Hughey Long was the governor, and so there was like there was just a lot of kind of these big, strong politicians that just ruled the land. 00:33:31 Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah, he told you. He told you Long. He said, if I could take Packham in Parish and push it off into the Gulf and get away from the United States, I do it. And you along told him I wish you could. 00:33:44 Speaker 2: He wanted it to be like his own nations. 00:33:46 Speaker 3: It was it was I tell you what, there wasn't a piece of trash on that road. You couldn't found a cigarette butter on that road. Cleanest place I want to see in your life. Beautiful. 00:33:59 Speaker 2: Here's David responding to Paul's story of Leander helping the guy out with the boat motor and. 00:34:06 Speaker 5: Look, there's not to say that, you know, Leander was not incapable of doing the occasional kind gesture for someone. But he made his bones, you know, using African Americans as targets of you know, prejudice and bigotry and scaring white people into saying, you know, I'm going to keep them out of the parish kind of thing, or I'm going to control them, they're not going to let them vote, or so. Yeah, he could occasionally throw a bone to someone, a kind gesture here or there, but mainly he was not. 00:34:48 Speaker 1: A good person. 00:34:50 Speaker 5: He was I think a very greedy, selfish, arrogant man who he was basically an amoral. 00:35:01 Speaker 2: Leander Perez became nationally known during the Civil rights movement as being a staunch segregationist and just classic good old fashioned bigot and David's movie Delta Justice. They played a clip of Leander on William F. Buckley's national talk show where he was asked directly about being a bigot, and Leander's answer was so repulsive Noah had permission to play it. It was just too grubby and I couldn't do it. But I'm glad that David put it on his movie. 00:35:35 Speaker 5: That's why I put the William A Fuckwee clip in there, because I said, I didn't make this up here he is. Here's here's the guy himself confessing on national television his beliefs. 00:35:45 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. 00:35:47 Speaker 5: But other than that, people, I'll tell you my story. When we released the film on DVD. It was during the Islnios Festival, which was in April of the following year, which would have been twenty sixteen, and this elderly African American gentleman came in and he said, are you mister Dubos. I said yes, I am. He said, you're the gentleman who made the movie about the trappers war. I said yes. He said you're selling those DVDs. I said yes, sir, and I said I'll take ten of them. He pulls out one hundred dollars pill because we were like ten bucks each. And I said, can I ask why A you're buying ten of them? He said, I want to give them to my grandchildren. Because I went to see your movie at the film festival. He said, I came back and started your film three times. I watched you do your Q and A after every he said, and I just wanted to thank you for showing what kind of person Leandon Perez was. And he said, I want to teach that to my children and grandchildren. But you know, so they're people's people are complicated. I think Leander was in some ways complicated, but in other ways, I think he saw a way to use his power and his wealth and his influence to a negative degree. So much so, like Carville said in the film, he's the most odious person in the history of Luisiana. And that says a lot because there's been a lot of people going through this state that have been notorious people. 00:37:21 Speaker 2: What about this part of the world produces kind of these dictator type leaders. 00:37:29 Speaker 5: We've had a colorful history of politicians here. Perez is just one of them. Edwin Edwards was our governor for many years. I think he served three terms, and he was a very colorful Cajun Democrat governor. He was on Sixty Minutes. He just meant Edwin was he was kind of like Clinton magnified. He loved women, he loved drinking, he loved gambling. He got caught carrying a suitcase of a million dollars into a casino one time. Sixty Minutes asked him about it, and he said, they said, you know, that's quite unusual for a governor to be carrying Goes misity. 00:38:17 Speaker 1: It's unusual. 00:38:19 Speaker 5: And I just kind of like stopped and they looked up, like, well, don't you think that's he Goes. I don't know if it's illegal, it's unusual, but you know, it just kind of like brushed it off with the seventies and then again in the eighties. It was a race in eighty eight when he ran against David Duke, who was the notorious clansman who ran for governor, and Edwin had to come back and said, there used to be a famous bumper sticker said vote for the crook, meaning Edwin, it's important over Duke. 00:38:52 Speaker 2: Vote for the crook. It's important. Yeah, wow, what about Huey Long. 00:38:57 Speaker 5: Huey Long was another and again on Randy Newman's there's a song called the Kingfish. It was about Huey Long. He was a very highly respected and very popular populist governor, so he would be the equivalent of kind of uh, a more moderate version of Bernie Sanders might be a good description of him. He was very much giving back to the people. But if you ever saw All the King's Men, which is a famous Hollywood movie with Broderick Crawford, he played essentially Huey Long. That was a Pulitzerprise winning book, and they did a remake with Sean Penn which wasn't good. But the original film is wonderful and it's about Huey Long, and it's about how even the best intentioned person, once they get to power, you know, absolute power corrups absolutely. 00:39:55 Speaker 3: Kind of thing. 00:39:56 Speaker 5: And Huey Long, you know, he did kick out stand oil from essentially, you know, stealing the oil from the land owners was kind of like a bigger version of the Trappers War. But Hughey was again a colorful character. And then his brother, Earl Long. They made a movie about him called Blaze with Paul Newman in the eighties, and Earl was quite a character. Earl was institutionalized while he was governor, and then he so the. 00:40:25 Speaker 2: Two brothers both were governors at different times. 00:40:28 Speaker 5: Yeah, well, let me tell you this quick story about Earl Long. So he's in a mental institution because the people wanted to take over the state threw him in there, and then he found a loophole where called the guy in charge of mental institutions. He said, is this so and so on the line who runs the mental institution I'm currently in. Yes it is this is the governor Earl Long. You're fired. I'm here by appointing you know so and so to being which was his friend. He says, I here by release ear Along. You know, very famous story which is hit it in the movie with Paul Newman. Yeah, Earl was a character Huey was. You know, he had his handle a lot of pockets. Again, when you're in charge of a state like Louisiana, which at the time was oil rich, mineral rich. Today even I think something like forty percent or it might be as high as sixty percent of the natural gas in the country comes from here. I mean, Louisiana is one of the most important states we in terms of providing services for the country and so when you are the governor of this state, you have a lot of power and even but back then it was magnified because there wasn't a lot of oil drilling, but the ones that were being done in Louisiana were, I mean it was. It was unbelievably rich. 00:41:55 Speaker 2: A lot of people made a lot of money. And they didn't have the Internet, no tell on people, they didn't have nothing cell phones and email communications. It was just an environment that I guess lended itself to potentially. 00:42:09 Speaker 5: Look, man, when you are in charge of something and if you are tempted by millions of dollars and the power to get away with it, human nature is going to dictate that. That's hard to resist because look what's going on now, what look at all the things that have happened in our country over the last fifty years, just from politicians going to jail, whether it was Watergate or all the things, you know, and he never sees sometimes the people in charge, like a lot of people around Clinton and Trump went to jail, but they didn't, you know. So yeah, you got to wonder, you know, keep their hands clean. Everybody else is going to dirty them for them, you know. So they've learned a lot since then. Here we long was assassinated by the way in the state capitol, on the steps of the capitol. There's a lot of conspiracy theories about. 00:43:08 Speaker 2: That, but he was really I mean, the same story on a very small scale involving muskrats that happened with Leander Perez. 00:43:17 Speaker 5: Absolutely. 00:43:17 Speaker 2: I mean it's like, yeah, at some level, you talk about a story about big oil money and governing a state, this was Leander Perez just had his parish that he was the king of. 00:43:31 Speaker 5: He was the dictator of his own parish for sure. 00:43:34 Speaker 2: So it's this thing scales inside of people power scales. 00:43:38 Speaker 1: Absolutely. 00:43:46 Speaker 5: You've seen the film, yes, do you remember the last shot of the film, So the ending shot is of what looks like a muskrat. I ended the film with that image because it's like all of this fighting, all of this bloodshed and warfare and animosity over this creature, and it's just sort of the matter of factness of the animal who's just oblivious to its environment, you know. 00:44:15 Speaker 2: You know, it also shows the frivolity of human nature too, that's right, that we were willing to kill in order to get this little little animal. Yeah, that's not even nobody wants fur coats, nobody. I mean, fur trade's kind of coming back just a little bit in some places. But it was this fashion trend, you know, that pushed people in this time to do this kind of extreme stuff. 00:44:41 Speaker 5: Yeah. Here humans are fighting over money and land, and here are these animals. They're just still oblivious to the insanity that we are producting in our daily lives and they're just going about their business. 00:45:02 Speaker 2: Is there something that we can learn about human nature? About people? Like, what's the what's the value in this story? 00:45:09 Speaker 1: I'd have to look at leand the Perez's position that some men, I guess I would want that power to do what they want to do. 00:45:19 Speaker 2: So that's that shows you that there's kind of dangerous people out there. 00:45:23 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well Leander wasn't the first one. It is not going to be the last one. There's always some people like that out there. You know that they just when they get a certain amount of power, it just upsets them, you know, I guess m hm. So you know, somebody mentions LeAnn the Perez that's this is all I can think of. He tried to kill more people. H Yeah, other people may look at him different, but I can it's sad. 00:46:11 Speaker 2: Looking into the lives of humans is wildly interesting and to me, especially when it overlaps with wildlife, even muskrats. But inside of these stories, I think that we can learn so much. And as a final thought in regards to the animals, today, muskrats are almost completely gone out of Louisiana. They have been ecologically replaced by the invasive nutria. In the last few years, less than four hundred muskrats were trapped annually in the whole state, down from millions one hundred years ago. Things are always changing and Wimpy Serenai and Paul Leguard's family land on Delacroix Island, where their families used to trap, are now almost completely underwater as South Louisiana continues to sink. It's a wild story. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease Brins, This Country Life and Lakes Backwoods University. Please leave us a review on iTunes, share this podcast directly with a friend, share it on social media. We thank you so much for your support this Bear Grease feed and what we're doing keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live.