Jim Bradshaw
‘A good old soul bested’
The venerable old paddle-wheeler Borealis Rex was steaming as hard as it could to get from Cameron to Lake Charles when the big hurricane of 1918 caught up to it.
Forty passengers were on board, plus two engineers, the pilot, a cook, and two deck hands. One of the passengers was Ned McCain, the 10-year-old son of Tom McCain, one of three brothers who owned the boat. (The other two were James Medd McCain and Angus Bouie McCain.)
The passengers had no other way to flee. There were no roads then. The Rex was the only way to get out. It normally made three runs each week; to Cameron on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, then back to Lake Charles on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The boat carried mail, freight, groceries, bales of cotton, cattle, firewood, and even automobiles to Cameron, returning to Lake Charles with oranges, grapefruit, cotton, rice, garden vegetables, seafood and livestock.
Archie Hollister, a columnist for the Cameron Pilot, wrote in 1960, “Her passenger list was always large; on any trip there were likely to be a dozen or two, and often seventy-five or a hundred people would engage passage. The river was the highway to the world, and the Rex was the means whereby they came and went. … She was their one link with the outside world, and her coming and departure were moments of importance.”
The trip on August 6, 1918, was of more than ordinary importance. A major hurricane was sweeping in from the Gulf.
According to Ned’s recollection many years later, the Rex made it to Prien Lake, just down the Calcasieu River from Lake Charles, before it was blown ashore — tossed one way and then the other as the storm’s eye passed over it.
“All forty passengers, plus the six crew members … got off safely,” Ned remembered. “All of us were … sheltered in the George M. King summer home. When the hurricane reversed direction … the Rex was blown about a mile downstream, up against another shore. Ten-foot waves washed over her and sank her.”
When Angus McCain talked about “how the storm used his tried and trusty boat, it was as though he was speaking of a human being whom he greatly loved,” according to a newspaper report. “He told of the fight the Rex made, struggling along at seven miles an hour in the teeth of the mighty wind; striving so hard to reach port and, finally, after all the passengers were safely off, giving up and lying down in defeat, a good old soul bested.”
A diver from Galveston looked at the wreck and found the hull and machinery intact, so the McCains decided to refloat the good old soul. The battered boat was towed up the Calcasieu to the Clooney shipyard for repairs.
When the $15,000 job was finished, the Rex was “handsomer and more commodious than ever,” according to reports of the day. It was painted white with green trim and the kitchen was described as “the completest thing of its kind outside a large city apartment house. There [is] a huge range, the top of which [can] hold 5 or 6 steaming kettles of good things, and the oven [is] large enough to hold a turkey, a johnny cake, and a pan of yams.”
The first round trip after the refurbishment was on April 29, 1919. The Rex left Lake Charles with 40 tons of miscellaneous freight, including lumber, farm implements, groceries, and the mail.
But things were changing. In the 1920s, the Rex lost one of its primary sources of income, the mail contract, to a faster, gasoline powered boat.
Then, in 1930, sparks from the boiler caught some wood on fire. The fire was contained but, while the crew devoted its attention to fighting the fire, the Rex struck a mud bank and was stranded and damaged.
She was fixed and put afloat again, but it was no longer a paying proposition to spend a lot of money on repairs and maintenance.
The final blow came in 1931, when the first road connecting Calcasieu and Cameron parishes brought quicker and cheaper travel. The old boat was tied up at its wharf at the foot of Pujo Street, near the Lake Charles business district, and never steamed again.
By 1935, the stately old Rex was an eyesore hulk, its superstructure gone, and its “wide, flat-bottomed hull [buried] deep in the mud,” according to a newspaper report. “Only her once-proud bow, now a battered, broken shell is still thrust above the waters among the gaunt pilings, rotted remnants of the wharf that has slowly died with her.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
