Bear Grease - Ep. 339: One-Day Trappers' War - Why Corrupt Leaders?

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, we are looking into the actual events of the April 12, 1926, one-day Trappers' War in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana where mercenaries hired by Judge Leander Perez mounted a machine gun on a boat and attempted to kill the Islenos trappers on Delacroix Island.  We will also look deeper into the life of Leander Perez while asking why so many corrupt leaders have come out of this region of the country. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. The stretch that the fought, the battle was taken is about a mile so. The boat was gone and they was with the machine gun and the people from Dullochoo were shooting over the level, you know, just shooting their shotguns, rifles, whatever they have. Yeah.

A lot of them would birdshot, a lot of them with buckshot. What killed the machine gun, man, I don't know, I guess just shot them up because it's the way I understand that the motor was all shot up. The boat, the cabin on a boat was all shot up with bullet holes. I guess that's what I could see, you know. On this episode, we're getting into the nitty-gritty details of the November 1926. One day, Islamios Trappers War in South Louisiana over Muscat Trapping Rights. We'll hear from two men whose fathers were involved in the war.

But a bigger question to me is why? 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 going to want to miss this one. And for anyone new to the Bear Grease feed, we have multiple podcasts on this feed. Bear Greece, 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 enjoy this episode. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives, close to the land. Presented by FHF gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. We established in the last episode the culture of the Islanyos Trappers Camps on Delacroix Island in Louisiana in the 1920s and how Muskrat soared in value, making formerly almost

worthless swamp land extremely valuable. This is Placcomine Parishes Paul Lagarde In those days, there wasn't no, you own this piece of land And now the guy owned that, it was all open prairie. It was just like Wild West. And when it's, you know, when it stood at the beginning of the season, you went out there and you picked out a spot and you put your trap line out. And people honored each other's areas, you know.

He said that went on for a few years. and the politicians got involved with it. But what they wanted to do is take a percentage away from each trapper. And they wouldn't go for it. There's people who'd been trapping that land for at that time almost 150 years. You know? And now they had camps. People used to build camps in the priority for they could.

The whole family went out there. and in some cases, and they spent the winter, you know, trapping, and the women were cooking, take care of the far as in the men, we're probably working. Well, they pushed them out of those camps, and they brought in trappers from West Louisiana or Texas. They brought in their own trappers and put them in the camps. What Paul is calling the prairie is what I understand. stand to be swamp land. The people who had trapped here for 150 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 Islanyos were not going to take this from Perez. Here's what they did to the new trappers that were now in their old camps. My grandfather told me that those camps wasn't nothing, but more or less a platform, they built a big platform, and they put a tarpeie.

a shack around it. And he said they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they're waiting, a gang of fellows, not one guy, but a bunch of good fellows would wait until, say, 10 o'clock in the morning, when all the men were out in the, in the, and they go and they take, tell them women, take all your stuff, and make, they told, they didn't try to hurt those people because they were working people just like they were. They make them take everything out to camp, their supplies, they're going, they're beds there, whatever they had.

And they had 15, 20 guys. They picked that camp, I'm throwing the buyer. The whole camp we go in the buyer. So when that happened, they brought in the Texas Rangers to protect them. And that's when the real trouble started. The real trouble started as Perez hired mercenaries to kill and intimidate the islanyos. 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. And we've been backed into a corner here, folks. We've got to talk just a little bit about muskrats. My name is Martin Coker. I work for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisher's in Parks, and I currently serve at the nuisance species program biologist and also the fur bearer program biologist. This guy is a muskrat expert.

A rare breed. But the muskrat is in the rodent family, native to the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S., it has at least 14 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 9 to 14 inches long with a tail anywhere from 7 to 12 inches. So you're talking about 24, 26 inches head to the end of the tail. They're going to weigh anywhere from like a pound and a half to four and a half pounds. Muskrats weren't really seen that much in Louisiana until like the late 1800s, 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 minks, all were linked to the muskrat increase. Now, after that, the predators were gone away, the habitat's gone up, and then the musk rats appeared in the millions. It was just like a population explosion. It was an article in the 1902 in the New York Times, his headline was, the muskrat is the principal fur producer in America. There was a quote from the, I think, the Fort Worth Star in 1908 in this state, that Louisiana has the largest fur trade in the world. right and that now that is verifiable if you go back and look at the records or not that louisiana was the fur trapping capital of the u.s. or it was more furs coming from louisiana than anywhere else the muskrat trade peaked around 1925 when they were worth a dollar 30 each and a good trapper could

catch as many as 150 day yielding thousands of dollars during the 75-day season and several millions of dollars worth of muskrat furs were flowing through Placcomine Parish alone. I could see Steve Rinella wanting to get in on that. Here is Wimpy Serenay. He's 84 years old and was raised on Delacroix Island in the trapping camps. He's going to take us right into the one-day war. What happened with Perez and that, it was long before I can, you know, get in.

But Perez gathered up Cajans from the west part of Louisiana, Texans, gunslingers at that time. It was really gunslingers. And he formed like a little army. He mounted a machine gun on an oyster boat, I think it was, or either a boat, you know. What happened before they attacked, the people from Delacruhe found out about it. that they were planning this thing. Matter of fact, my dad, he used to have relatives in what they called Carnarvon,

and these Texans, and that was hang around the ballrooms there, you know? And he overheard them saying, we're going to make some Spanish soup out of these chakes down here, you know. Take them. So they found out about that. Now, who? Was your dad involved in finding out about it?

Yeah. He found out about it. And I guess other people did too because they had relatives in Carnarv. And this is where these guys used to hang up. When they were starting to get together, you know, going to bar rooms and that, I guess they talked. And so the people from Delacroo found out that they were coming. After almost 100 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. 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 War. Word filtered down from, they got into a bar, not too far from where the Islanios were. and it was literally just guys bragging in a bar that they were going to go down to Delacro 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. So this gunboat with these Texas Rangers, this machine gun gun mounted on the boat comes down the bayou. There's a levee, which is like a dam that's keeping the bayou from going into the land. And behind the levee is the Islanyos houses. Right. Author Glenn Jensen estimated there to be 400 armed Islanios on the levee waiting on this gunboat when it arrived.

The machine gun was essentially a Gatlin gun, like on a World War II boat. And the captain of the boat was J. H. Asher, a former Texas ranger from D.S. 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 Islanyos camps with rounds from that machine gun. Who knew these people were so passionate about muskrats? And the way I understand it, they mounted the machine gone on the boat. And so they mounted, and they came up what they called Gentilly. It was, you know, the island, like I said, with the machine gun. And, you know, you and all of the Texans in that.

But the people from down there was ready. So they got their shotgun. There was a levy. Whether or if you go down there, you can see the road is on the levee. And it was a higher levy than what it is today because everything sank it. But anyway, it was much higher.

So they just got behind the limit with their shotguns and whatever guns that they had. And when they made the turn into the Bayterra buff, you know they started with the machine gun but they also went I got to back up a little bit it took the machine gun the night before and set it to shoot over the levy

over the bank you know to buy you the bank but what happened when they attacked the next morning the tide went down so they had to fix the machine gun but it couldn't reach the islanios It couldn't angle upwards? Correct.

So they were kind of stuck. They tried to get it up and angle it up. Those things were enormously heavy. And then you're in the line of fire, too. You have to remember that. So when they couldn't adjust that machine gun like that dude and did it. So when they would shoot, it was hitting the levee instead of hitting the people because the tide went down.

And so it would hit the back soon. You know, the machine gun didn't do them too much good. And, of course, who had the other people with their pistols and guns and what have you, you know. And they started, they were right there, and they shot up the machine gun boat. They killed the, it's the only one was killed. The guy that was running the machine gun boat, you know. Quite a few guns. Quite a few guns.

Well, the stretch that the fought, the battle was. was taken is about, let's see, about a mile or so, you know, where the battle took place where they were at, where they were set up. They were just shooting that whole mile down the canal, this gunship and machine gun. That's what our vision. Yeah. The boat was going and they was with the machine gun and the people from Delaware were shooting over the level, you know, just shooting their shotguns or 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 what killed the machine gun, man, I don't know, I guess just shot them up. The way I understand the motor was all shot up, the boat, the cabin on a boat was all shot up with bullet holes. I guess that's what I could see, you know. Yeah. The man who was killed, Sam Galland, was reported by the coroner to have 17 bullet holes in his

body. But the Aslanios had the, you know, the trajectory, sort of like a 45 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 it in the military sometimes in these wars. They, you know, when you get trapped like that. You're just, there's no way out. So you have studied about this and talked to all these different people.

Who do you think fired the first shot? Probably the Islayneos. Probably. They weren't going to sit there and let them fire a machine gun at him. Only one person was killed one Texas Ranger, whose last name was Gowlin. Sam Gowlin.

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. Perez wasn't on the boat, though. No, he was not.

Of course not. Those were his hired guns, literally. He was nowhere near the boat. He's not going to get his hands dirty. He's not going to get shot at. And I'm sure he had people around him protecting him. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts.

Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. if you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good.

turkey noises and getting action. And was your dad there? Hmm? Was your father there? Yeah, he was there. Yeah, yeah. And like I was saying, my dad had went to, something happened. I don't know what it was, I just told these things, that these Texans and gunslingers, well, when they started getting shot out, they started running through the march, and they shot them up, you know, but they didn't kill them all.

they got all shot up and one of them was swimming across the bay and this is one of the little incident I was told and a friend of my dad and he said look that's the guy that tried to beat you up

and got off in the couch and my dad had an Elsie Smith shot double shotgun and I didn't know but he had it in our attic and he never did use it I used to go up there and I could see it

the stock was cracked, you know. And somebody else told me that my dad hit that guy with a stock of a shotgun and they broke the stock. Oh, wow. And I remember the shotgun. It was an old L.C. Smith and the stock was broken. Paul told me the same story about Wimpy's dad breaking a gun stock off one of the boatmen's heads. Here is Paul with an unusual story of a firsthand account from a man on the boat. involving a wild coincidence with a dog and a guy named To Wuts.

Yep, to Wuts. 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 38 years old. I was 15, 15 years old when he died. We used to go to Highway 11. They had a family over there. There were S stands.

The old man was Pete, and he had a son that was Pete. One of them was to woods. Old man, old man Pete, his daddy, was on the boat when they shot it up. Like I said, those people had no education. They looked to make a dollar wherever they could make a dollar. He wasn't from Delcrow. But they'd come there to the trap, when the trapping was good. They stayed.

You said, well, some kind of way he got mixed up and got on that boat. They must have gave him a job, that can or whatever. And he got on that boat. And he told me, he said, when they started shooting that boat, the cast net lads were bouncing off. And I asked him, I said, the cast net led, they said, yeah, they take a cast net led. It's got a hole clean through it. You know the cast net? Yeah.

And they'd 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 jackets And then the rifle shells Was gone clean through that boat And it wasn't no steel boat like they had It 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 was sleeping the other side of the motor And he said three or four of them Texas Rangers jumped on top of them Trying to get away from getting behind motor, you said, trying to get away from that.

And, well, let me back up a minute. We used to go over there and buy crabs. We buy crabs, 52-pound hamper crabs for $4 on hamper, number ones. But anyway, we were over there buying them, and old man, Pete was there. He had a bunch of old cars and truck stuff, you know, junk. And they had a dog in there. And that dog come out wanting to eat or something. He told him, told that dog, go lay down, dog.

The dog went and went back and laid down. And he told you, he said, no, that dog is. Now, I can't remember exactly. It was 16 or 18 years old. He said, I've been having that dog a long time. But then he said, it's an old dog. And we went in that house. He told a story about that being behind that motor.

And then Texas ranges 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. Wow. That dog was laying there dead. He died while he told that story. Yeah.

It's odd the things you remember that seem completely disconnected. But I think these are mechanisms in our mind to help us remember the important stuff. Like an 18-year-old dog dying while the moment. man was telling you about being on the gunship. That's just odd. That's what I'm here for, Paul. Good story. Here is Wimpy. I'm trying to understand like how the thing could escalate to where Leander Perez was willing to kill people. Yeah, how did that, how does that happen? The only thing I can understand is that he told these guys, all these people that he hide, look, we have to be. We have to take care of them people at Delacro Island and you're going to have 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 and we've got to run them off and even if we have to kill so that was a bond. So he just had 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 exactly That's why I kind of consider him a dictator, you know. He had that power, and he thought he can just do anything until he faced the people from Delacron. What about his reputation here?

Like if he were to go on the street, like when we drove here, we drove down. Perez Drive, yeah, Leander Perez Drive. Well, a lot of the politicians were with him in St. Bernard. Perez Drive was named after Leander Perez in 1969. But in the late 1990s, 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.

Tell me how your dad handled. the Trappers War. So he was actually there on the levee with a gun. Did he, he didn't view that as like something real honorable that he had done, like he had defended his people.

Was it just kind of like something he didn't want to talk about? Right. He didn't talk about it too much. I guess he felt like it was survival. He had to fight to survive. Like it wasn't a cool story to him. Like today, Today, a hundred years later, we're like, wow, listen to this.

Wow, this is what happened. 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 survive. It's either a kill or be killed. It's interesting in the history because it's real easy to kind of glorify something good and bad 100 years later. 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 evil of mankind. What do do you think about that? I think about what a person with power would try to do to maintain that power. That would be

Landa Perez. Even if he had the kill to do it, he did it. That's how I look at it. As far as a lot of people like Lianna Pared, but I couldn't. Why could I? It's kind of wild to think about people having a... Right.

Trying to kill each other over a muskrat. Right. You know, ain't that something. You're right. Today you're looking at a man, and people kill himself from a muskrat. You were a way of living, you know? Yeah. You have to survive.

Here's a simple version of how the conflict reached its final resolution. It involved a guy named Manuel Milero that was in its lanyos. So the people went to Manuel Malero. He was an educated man with money successful. They said, can you help us? He buys the land. Right. 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 somewhere and formed Delacro Corporation, named that out for Delacro. And he bought it. then people would trap for him because he would buy it a far. Telecooperation would buy it apart.

Okay. I was okay. Like I said, he's a businessman, you know, shrewd businessman. So he buys all this land, okay? Okay, there's 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 arranged with Leanne the Perez. But talking to his granddaughter, they hated Leanne the Perez. You know, and I thought, wow, how can he buy this land without going through the dictator of Blackman Parish? I couldn't answer that.

But he did buy. And then he sold it to the trap as the people from Delacro. So he sold the land back to them? He didn't lease it to him. No, we could. Some of them, some people didn't buy land, but they're all, even if you bought the land, you have to sell you for the Delacro Corporation.

So Malero 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 18901 in Plaquemine Parish raised in a wealthy Catholic family, graduated from LSU with a law degree in 1914 at the age of 23, and was appointed judge of Plaquemine Parish by his cousin in 1919. Early on, he was accused to 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 1923, while he was still really young, there was an impeachment petition charged against him to impeach him as judge.

And there were 23 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.

Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I

get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt

with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with plays cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Here's Paul. I've read a book about Leander Perez.

Yeah, me too. God knew him. You knew the man? I met him, yeah. quite a few times. How is he perceived around here? Is he a hero or is he a villain? They don't even know him no more.

I think he was a, I think basically he was a good man. He was a segregationist completely. And he ran that parish with a pretty stiff hand. But it was a good parish. It was a,

it was the wealthiest, it was the wealthiest, it was the wealthiest parish. in the United States. He kind of had the reputation of being like a crooked politician. I mean, is that? Yeah, I said he were crooked. I say all of them were crooked. It was like the Cowboys days down here.

But they had good points to him, too. You know, they claim he was such a bad man with the black people. I had a buddy of mine. He and me and him was in Army together. Went through basic training and friends all over. you know, until he died. And he told me he was in a bar room down there one day. His motor had broke down in his boat.

He's oyster fishermen. And his motor was broken his boat. And the ballroom's down there. They had imaginary line running through the middle of them. The white people stood on one side. The black people stood on the other side. And he was in the ballroom by the ball. And Leander Perez walked in.

He asked him, he said, Paul, what's the matter? You're not working? he wanted to better working people making 11 for themselves 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 he told me he said Paul he said go up to Donovan that was the main place where you got your motors and all up in the city he said put get you the motor you need and put it on my charge account he said but I want you to pay me he said you come in payment said okay judge

so And this part, this is a guy that you knew. Yeah, I was in the Army. And he was a black guy. Black. Yeah. Yeah. A fine boy, fine man.

He wasn't a boy. He was a man, a piece of man, too. But anyway, yeah, he had a lot. He had, everybody, everybody's got good and bad in him. You know, it's, what's good to one person might be bad for somebody else looking at a situation. When did you meet Leander Perez? When I was a child, a kid, 14, 12, 14, 15 years old.

Leander Perez brought the first Charley Bull from Mexico in here. They sent an oyster boat with the they had pens on, oyster boat, the whole oysters on the deck. They put the pens up,

he went down there and got him a bull, and he brought it to Idaho. That's on the other side of the river. That was his place on another side of the river. And old man, DeBella took us, I can remember him taking us there. And the judge was. sitting on the front porch.

And he all at the judge. He said, well, look at the boat. Go ahead. Right back in and look at him. Oh, yeah, they had on him. I mean, I like that. Big, big, I don't know. Boy.

You know what he'd ask you? You caught you on the street? You're being good, huh, boy? Yeah. What would he say? You're being good, huh, boy? Yeah, Judge. You know, you'd ask if he was being good, you know?

That was the time when Huey 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. Yep. Yeah, he told Yui Long and said, if I could take Placcommon Parish and push it off into the Gulf, get away from the United States, I'd do it. And you along to him, I wish you could. He wanted it to be like his own nation. It was.

It was. Yeah. I'll tell you what, there wasn't a piece of trash on that road. You couldn't have found cigarette butter than road. cleanest place you I want to see in your life. Beautiful. Here's David responding to Paul's story of Leander, helping the guy out with the boat motor. And 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 a good person. He was, I think, a very greedy, selfish, arrogant

man who he was basically an amoral guy. Leander Perez became nationally known during the civil rights movement as being a staunch, segregationist, and just classic, good old-fashioned bigot. In 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. Though I 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. That's why I put the William F. Buckley clip in there because I said, I didn't make this up. Here he is.

Here's the guy himself, confessing on national television, his beliefs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But other than that, people, I'll tell you my story, when we released the film on DVD, it was during the Aslanios Festival, which was in April, of the following year, which would have been 2016. And this elderly African-American gentleman came in, and he said, are you Mr. 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 10 of them. He pulls out a $100 bill because it were like $10 each.

And I said, can I ask why you're buying 10 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&A after every. He said, and I just wanted to thank you for showing what kind of person Leander Perez was. And he said, I want to teach that to my children and grandchildren.

But, you know, so 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 Louisiana, and it says a lot because there's been a lot of people going through this state that have been notorious people. What about this part of the world produces kind of these dictations, kind of these dictations,

type leaders. 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 60 Minutes. He was, he just, man,

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. 60 minutes. Asked him about it.

And he said, they said, you know, that's quite unusual for a governor to be carrying. He goes, yes, it is unusual. And I just kind of like stop the day of time.

I'm like, well, don't you think that's, he goes, I don't know if it's illegal. It's unusual. You know, it just kind of like brushed it off. When was the governor?

70s. And then again in the 80s, there was a race in 88 when he ran against David Duke, who was the notorious Klansman 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. Vote for the crook. It's important. Yeah. Wow.

What about Huey Long? Hughie Long was another, and again, on Randy Newman's album, 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 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 Pulitzer Prize 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 intention person

once they get to power you know absolute power corrupts absolutely kind of thing and Huey Long you know he did kick out standard oil from essentially, you know, stealing the oil from the landowners. It was kind of like a bigger version of the Trappers War. But Huey was, again, a colorful character. And then his brother Earl Long, they made a movie about him called Blaze with Paul Newman in the 80s.

And Earl was quite a character. Earl was institutionalized while he was governor. And then he... So the two brothers, both were governors at different times. time. 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 online who runs the mental institution I'm currently in? Yes, it is. This is the governor, Earl Long. You're fired. I'm hereby appointing so-and-so to be, which was his friend. He says, I hereby release Earl Long. You know. very famous story, which is recreated in the movie with Paul Newman. Yeah, Earl was a character. Hughie, he had his hand on 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 40%, or it might be as high as 60% of the natural gas in the country.

country comes from here. I mean, Louisiana is one of the most important states 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 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 unbelievably rich. A lot of people made a lot of money. And they didn't have the internet to tell on people. They didn't have cell phones and email communications. It was just an environment that I guess lended itself to potentially be.

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. Look at all the things that have happened in our country over the last 50 years just from politicians going to jail, whether it was Watergate or all the things. And you never see sometimes the people in charge. Like a lot of people around Clinton and Trump went to jail, but they didn't. You know, so you got to wonder, you know.

keep their hands clean, everybody else is going to dirty them for them. So they've learned a lot since then. Huey Long was assassinated, by the way, in the state capital, on the steps of the capital. There's a lot of conspiracy theories about that, but he was eventually. That's really, I mean, the same story on a very small scale involving muskrats that happened with Leander Perez. Absolutely. 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. He was the dictator of his

own parish, for sure. So this thing scales inside of people, power scales. Absolutely. 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 musk rat. 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, it also shows the frivolity of human nature, too. That's right. That we were willing to kill in order to get this 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. Yeah, here are humans are fighting over money and land, and here are these animals. They're just still oblivious to the insanity that we are conducting in our daily lives, and they're just going about their business. Is there something that we can learn about human nature, about people? Like, what's the value in this story?

I'd have to look at Leander Perez's position that some men, I guess, would want that power to do what they want to do. So that shows you that there's kind of dangerous people out there. Oh, yeah. 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. So, you know, somebody mentions laying the breath. This is all I can think of.

He tried to kill my people. Other people may look at him different, but I can't. It's sad. 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 400 muskrats were trapped annually in the whole state down for millions a hundred years ago. Things are always changing. And Wimpy Serenei and Paul Lagarde'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 Greece, rinse 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.

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