The Kaintucks take over New Orleans -- again

Congratulations to the University of Kentucky for their victory in the NCAA basketball championship. The Superdome was certainly rocking Monday night, if not from the cheers of wildcat fans on the inside then from the violent spring thunderstorm on the outside. More about that thunderstorm in a bit.

New Orleans was awash with Kentuckians during the Final Four just as it had been three weeks earlier during the Southeastern Conference tournament. Judging by the color of the crowds thronging the Quarter, it appeared that at both events citizens of the Big Blue Nation far outnumbered the fans of all the other teams combined. A random sample of riders on my rickshaw would have confirmed this. In fact, ESPN reported that even when the wildcats took on LSU -- practically the hometown team -- in the SEC tournament, almost everyone in the near-capacity crowd was wearing Kentucky blue. "The Tigers... had hardly any representation outside of the players' families", the article said.

Noting all those blue t-shirts on Bourbon St. one night, I remarked to a colleague that Kentucky appeared to have colonized New Orleans -- which triggered a memory of something I had learned recently as I was preparing to take a test for a New Orleans tour guide's license. Bear with me here for a very brief (I promise!) history lesson.

During its colonial days Louisiana was bounced around like a basketball, a situation which couldn't have been easy on the colony's residents. Sovereignty over the swampy soil beneath their feet shifted constantly without anyone bothering to consult them -- or in some cases even to notify them. Here are some of the highlights:

• Soon after establishing the colony, France privatized it, handing over control to a rich banker named Antoine Crozat. Contrary to his hopes of exploiting Louisiana to add to his personal fortune,  Crozat found the colony to be a financial black hole, and just five years into what was to have been a 15-year charter, he gave Louisiana back.
• Control of the colony was then handed over to a corporation headed by a Scotsman named John Law, one of the most notorious (and brilliant) con men in the history of the humanity. Just to give you an idea what kind of man we're talking about here, one modern biography of John Law is entitled The Moneymaker: The True Story of a Philanderer, Gambler, Murderer, and the Father of Modern Finance. 
• In 1762 France gave Louisiana to Spain in a secret treaty, which the colonists didn't even hear about till two years later. (Frenchmen St., now home to many of New Orleans' best music venues, is named in honor of a group of colonists who were executed for their role in resisting the handover to Spain.)
• In 1800 Napoleon twisted the arm of Charles IV of Spain to make him give Louisiana back to France.
• By the time Spain and France got around to actually doing the transfer in 1803, Napoleon had already decided to sell Louisiana to the United States.

This last handover was by far the hardest for the colonists to take. Around this time there was a steady flow of thousands of Kentuckians -- "Kaintucks" as New Orleans' French-speaking residents called them -- floating downriver on keelboats and flatboats loaded with stuff to sell. Kentucky was the American frontier back then, and these riverboat men were a rough lot. In those days before the invention of the steamboat, travel upriver was next to impossible, so the Kaintucks, after selling their goods in the Crescent City, broke up their boats and sold them for lumber. Having filled their pockets with cash, their main interest was to indulge themselves with whores and whiskey before setting out on the long walk back upriver along the Natchez Trace. 

When the average French-speaking resident of New Orleans thought of an American, the image that came to mind was the Kaintuck -- a foul-mouthed, violent, dirty, drunken barbarian. New Orleanians had tolerated these Kaintucks for the economic benefits that they brought, but when word got out that Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the United States, the Creoles of New Orleans said, "Of God, please, no! We thought being under Spanish rule was bad, but now we've been bought by the KAINTUCKS!"

Now, more than 200 years later, thousands of Kentuckians were flooding New Orleans again, flowing down the freeway from the source of Bourbon whiskey to Bourbon St. So how do these modern sons of the Kaintucks compare to their uncouth ancestors? As it turned out, I found the Kentucky fans to be really nice folks. Just as a point of reference, they were definitely a much better-behaved bunch than the LSU-Alabama crowd that was here for the BCS Bowl. (But it may not be fair to compare a basketball crowd with a football crowd.)

That thunderstorm that I mentioned in the first paragraph probably played a part in limiting excesses as well. In the end it was the weather that was brutal, not the fans. The rain, which slacked up at times but never stopped entirely, made things miserable; and intense periods of lightening made the situation downright dangerous. The storm even caused a brief power outage in the French Quarter. 

For me, what should have been a very unpleasant night to be out on a pedicab was salvaged by the kindness of a pair of Kentucky belles who, out of gratitude for being given a ride to their hotel room in the driving rain, gave me a $100 tip for a ten minute trip. There's nothing like Benjamin Franklin's beautiful face to brighten up a cold, wet night. As far as I'm concerned, the Kaintucks can colonize us again anytime they want!