Are mastodon bones still hiding here?

Mastodons, those prehistoric animals that looked like fuzzy elephants, may have been among the earliest animals to graze the Cajun prairies, and there may have been more of them than we think.
The noted linguist William Read wrote in his 1931 study of Louisiana French that the place name Mamou is derived from mammouth, the French word for mammoth or mastodon. He refers to an early map that names the Prairie Mamou area of northwestern Acadiana as “Prairie Mammoth.” Also, it’s said that Carencro got its name from carrion (flesh-eating) crows that stripped the bones of one of the huge beasts. Martin Duralde, who was commandant at Opelousas from 1795 to 1803, seemed to believe that story.
He wrote about series of anthropological finds in a letter to the early naturalist William Dunbar in April 1802.
“About the year 1760, or a little after,” Duralde wrote, “chance led some person to the brink of a little bay, called Carencro, where there were heaps of bones. They were sound and of an enormous size. The person was struck with the circumstance, and made mention of it. The news spread, and everybody was curious to see them. Their length, their size, and above all, one or two Teeth … led the Spectators to judge, and it is well received Opinion, that this was the entire skeleton of an Elephant.”
He said the ribs were “perfectly distinguished,” as well as the vertebrae, the scapula, tibia and thigh bones.
“Mr. Peter Nezat, a man of strict veracity, who lived there and to whom the place belongs, has assured me that there was enough of the bones to load, if not two, at least one strong cart,” Duralde said. Nezat said he used one of the hip bones as an indigo press and that it was so heavy that it took a “very strong man” to handle it.
Six years earlier, Duralde continued, a man named Alexander Fontenot found on his property “an extraordinary tooth” that he believed had once been in an elephant’s mouth. And John Tesson, “a sincere and honest man” said that 15 years earlier he’d found the remains of “an enormous jaw bone” that weighed at least 25 pounds and that he supposed “could only belong to an Elephant.”
All of this prompted Professor W. M. Carpenter to survey the south Louisiana prairies during the summer of 1838. He reported his findings in a letter that was published in The American Journal of Science and the Arts in January 1839.
Carpenter described the excavation of a mastodon near Opelousas and suggested that others could be found.
“On all these prairies,” Carpenter wrote, “there are ponds which, on account of the impervious nature of the clay, contain water at all seasons. They are often situated on the highest part of the prairie … surrounded by … marsh plants. These ponds seem to be gradually filling up with vegetable matter, and are no doubt rich in fossils of the mastodon, and perhaps other animals.
“I visited three localities, at which remains of the mastodon have been found, and obtained some pieces. At one place, a mile distant from the village of Opelousas, an entire skull was disinterred, but it crumbled on exposure to the air, and nothing remains but the teeth; it must have been very large.”
The remains were found when stockmen tried to deepen the natural pond during a dry spell. About six feet down “they came to the head and some of the vertebrae, and then to a few ribs, all of which were in the natural position,” Carpenter reported. But then the dry spell ended and “rain drove them from the search,” he said. The rain filled the pond and covered the big bones.
There may be some old bones yet to be discovered. In May 1970, workmen digging next to the Vermilion River near the Evangeline Thruway in Lafayette turned up more mastodon bones.
UL (then USL) professor Jon Gibson and some of his archaeology students did some work at the site and found more bones and four large teeth, but their hope for a complete skeleton didn’t materialize. The rest of this Mammut americanus had either washed or rotted away.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.