Three Rapides Families

Peter Robert, Robert Tanner, and William Pearce, Sr. They were pioneers who left their homes at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and, traveling in ox wagons and flat boats, brought their families safely through the uninhabited wilder--ness of the great southwest to that section of the country in central Louisiana watered by Bayou Boeuf. When they ¿ first saw it there was little in the landscape to attract them. As far as the eye could see there were only dense cane brakes and impenetrable swamps. It was the character of the soil which induced them to settle there. For nearly a century and a half that soil has never failed to produce the most abundant cotton, corn and sugar cane crops in the whole Southland.