Click for Printable Map To Our Office
(This lovely article appeared in
NOLA.com and is written by a Times-Picayune writer. You can click on the
headline to go there directly. I have reproduced it here just in case it
eventually disappears.)
By John Pope
Mobile, Ala.,
claims its Mardi Gras tradition stretches back the
furthest, but we in New Orleans say otherwise
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Staff writer
The first Mardi Gras in the United States had no floats, no beads, no
go-cups and no king cakes.
But where did it occur? On a soggy riverbank downriver from where New
Orleans would rise, or in the new settlement called Mobile in south
Alabama?
This issue has been the basis of a good-natured squabble between
partisans of the two cities for as long as anyone can remember because
each city's advocates claim their municipality owns the distinction of
being first.
New Orleanians can point to March 3, 1699, when a group of French
explorers set up camp on the west bank of the Mississippi River, about
60 miles downriver from the site that would become New Orleans.
Since that day just happened to be Mardi Gras, a major event on the
French calendar, the group's leader -- Pierre Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur
d'Iberville -- dubbed the spot, in the spelling of the time, La Pointe
du Mardy Gras.
And that apparently was that. But the location most definitely was in
Louisiana. The Rex organization put a marker at the site 300 years later.
Fast forward four years to the event that has given Mobilians their
reason to brag: In 1703, a group of French soldiers there held an
impromptu celebration. A year later, Nicholas Langlois established the
Societé de Saint Louis, a Carnival organization. A masked ball, Masque
de la Mobile, was held that year, and the first parade occurred in 1711.
Although these events occurred before New Orleans' founding in 1718,
historians say the Alabama celebration came to be known as Boeuf Gras,
not Mardi Gras.
Other parades followed in the Alabama city, but, according to
chroniclers of the celebration, they generally were held on and around
New Year's Day or Aug. 25, the feast day of St. Louis.
Perhaps the most notable -- and probably the noisiest -- was the Mobile
procession of the Cowbellions de Rakin Society. It was inaugurated in
1831, when a group of well-lubricated revelers celebrating the New Year
"borrowed or liberated" rakes, hoes and cowbells from a store, said
Stephen Hales, a New Orleanian who is a Carnival historian and enthusiast.
They then marched loudly through the streets to the mayor's home, where,
Hales said, they demanded -- and got -- food and drink.
A tradition was born. In 1840, the Cowbellions staged a parade featuring
horse-drawn floats with the theme "Heathen Gods and Goddesses."
In New Orleans, Mardi Gras activities started shortly after the city's
founding in 1718. There were reports of balls as early as the 1740s, and
marching clubs became part of the celebration, too. In the 1830s, there
were reports of parades consisting of long lines of carriages. But the
street celebrations got out of hand, becoming so unruly and, in some
instances, violent that by 1855, a New Orleans newspaper said Mardi Gras
should be banned.
The Cowbellions paraded in New Orleans in 1852 and helped a local group
establish the Mistick Krewe of Comus, which held its first parade -- the
first such local procession with a theme, "The Demon Actors of Milton's
'Paradise Lost' " -- in 1857. As a part of Comus' traditions, some krewe
members still brandish rakes and ring cowbells at the organization's
annual ball.
And that's where the lines are drawn, with each city being proud of its
celebration and happy to brag about it.
Proud traditions
Hales describes the situation as "a good-natured rivalry" between two
cities with this heritage in common: strong French and Catholic traditions.
There are differences. While Mobile's activities are more
family-oriented, New Orleans Mardi Gras is "more for the adults -- boobs
and beads," said Harry Finch, a native Mobilian who lives in New Orleans
and plans to visit both cities' celebrations
But, he said, that characterization is what outsiders believe, adding
that they're not aware of smaller, suburban parades, as well as
family-oriented festivals that are held in connection with the annual
celebration. While television and video cameras may focus on the
wildness of the French Quarter, such behavior is not tolerated along the
parade routes throughout the city, where Carnival is a celebration for
families and friends.
Even though New Orleans may out-shout the Gulf Coast city with
uninhibited, let-it-all-hang-out revelry, as well as high-tech
megaparades led by celebrities such as Danny Kaye, Whoopi Goldberg, Kirk
Douglas and Hulk Hogan, Mobilians remain proud of their celebration.
In his 1962 history of Mobile's Carnival, Julian Lee Rayford refused
even to mention New Orleans because, he wrote, New Orleans had become so
dominant that "too many people are totally ignorant of the part Mobile
has played."
Passion for pies
Among the Alabama city's most ardent chauvinists is an anonymous scribe
known only as the Masked Observer, who writes daily about parades, balls
and other Carnival activities in The Press-Register, the daily newspaper.
With tongue firmly in cheek, the Observer wrote:
"There probably is some resentment, some understandable envy, a little
bit of sibling rivalry. And who can blame New Orleans? They look over
here to Mobile and see what we have, and feel a little sour, perhaps.
But there's no reason. New Orleans has a perfectly adequate Mardi Gras,
given how new their celebration is. Nobody hits a home run their first
few times out."
As evidence of what the Observer described as "Mobile Carnival
superiority," he pointed out that floats are pulled by gleaming pickup
trucks, not tractors.
And, he said, there are Moon Pies. They were thrown briefly in New
Orleans, even in the Rex parade, but officials in that organization said
the craze died. No one knows who had the idea of tossing Moon Pies to
the masses in Mobile, the Observer said, but they have "caught on with a
passion."
"Cases and cases of the marshmallow-and-cookie treats are now pitched
each year and are a huge crowd favorite," he wrote. "They have a
distinct advantage over previous throws . . . in that they aren't as
much of a threat as a projectile."
Nothing to prove
Mobile, however, has jettisoned some of its traditions. For instance,
the organization that paraded with a papier-maché Boeuf Gras head there
came to an end in 1861 after 150 years.
The massive head was later used as cannon wadding in the defense of
Mobile during the Civil War, Rayford said. According to local legend, he
said, that provided the origin for the term "shooting the bull."
In New Orleans, the Boeuf Gras originally was represented in the Rex
parade by a live ox until 1901. In 1959, a papier-maché Boeuf Gras got
its own float, and plush versions of the ox have become prized throws.
"I'm a traditionalist," Hales said. "The fact that it disappeared from
the Mobile celebrations is, I think, a loss.'
He paused, then added, with some degree of disdain, "We have never used
our Boeuf Gras as cannon wadding."
In this friendly dispute, neither side is conceding. The Masked Observer
professes not to care about what historians say "as long as they agree
Mobile was first," he wrote. "If they don't reach that conclusion,
they're clearly cads and scoundrels, paid off by the New Orleans
contingent."
Given this friendly impasse, Hales said, "I think that Mobile believes
that it should have pride of place, and I don't think New Orleans has
anything to prove in the matter of celebrating."
But in terms of the crowds and attention that New Orleans' revelry
draws, compared with Mobile's, he said, "Perhaps the world has voted
with its feet."
John Pope can be reached at jpope@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3317.