18 GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES 
The settlers used pirogues, or dugout canoes, and flatboats for trans- 
porting themselves and their produce from place to place, traveling 
by day only and camping on shore at night. Later on, in the French 
and Spanish régimes, every grantee of land was required to build a 
levee along the bayous and on top of it a road. Such was the origin 
of the Spanish trail from New Orleans to San Antonio that goes 
through Lafayette and of many other roads still existing in southern 
Louisiana, 
There is a much used airport in the midst of the cane fields about 
3 miles west of Patterson. Cane fields extend far westward up the 
“Teche country,” with sugar mills at several places, including 
Shadyside and Bayou Sale. At Garden City a sawmill is in opera- 
tion, using logs floated up Bayou Teche from the Grand Lake region. 
Franklin, on the south bank of Bayou Teche, is an old commercial 
and sugar center, with large lumber and planing mills. Recently 
the operation of these mills has had to be discon- 
Franklin. tinued, as the supply of cypress became exhausted 
Elevation 10 feet. or too remote. 
Population 3,271. 
ew Orleans 102 miles, WOUisiana is not usually regarded as an earthquake 
region, but it has experienced occasional quakes. 
The last notable event of the kind was the earthquake of October 19, 
1930, the epicenter of which was in the Atchafalaya Valley between 
Franklin and Donaldsonville. 
Baldwin is a local center of the sugar business and of a district in 
which various crops are raised on the Bayou Teche ridge and the 
Baldwin. slopes extending south. A branch railroad and a 
eee highway lead southwestward to the Cypremort sugar 
Population 2. ‘refinery and the great salt mine at Weeks Island (or 
822. 
Raw Ortenne 00 miles. Grande Cote), (See p. 21.) 
In traveling across central-southern Louisiana the only visible 
features of geologic interest are the delta and bayou deposits, espe- 
cially the mounds built by bayou and river overflow which have been 
referred to on previous pages. Farther west are the wide terrace 
plains of low altitude, floored by alluvial deposits of Recent age. It 
would scarcely be suspected that under this smooth cover there are 
formations which represent a long and complex geologic history. 
Many deep borings have revealed this subsurface geology to a depth 
of 8,000 feet or more. Below the Eocene beds is a great thickness 
of earlier Tertiary, Cretaceous, and older strata down to the crystalline 
rocks which underlie them. The principal formations so far recog- 
nized are listed in the following table: 
