liontracker wrote: Texas is pretty close to Louisianna and Louisianna is where a lot of french settlers came in to this country.
I can't argue with you there. BUT, as a Louisianian who's ancestors homesteaded here in the Spanish Colonial days, how do we account for the almost total absence of a hunting hound culture in French Louisiana? No one can argue that my state has an extremely rich and proud heritage of producing some of the finest tree hounds that have ever hit the swamps and piney woods, but with just a little research you'll see that they were almost universally produced by men of Scots-Irish ancestry. In coastal south Louisiana, which is the only true "French" Louisiana, hunting with hounds is almost completely foreign.
I'm not making any kind of argument that French blooded hounds were not being imported into the United States as early as the 19th Century. I just don't believe they were coming in any kinds of numbers with French immigrants. One thing to remember is that there are three types of French immigrants to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The first, the Parisian French, actually came in very limited numbers and settled almost exclusively in the New Orleans urban area. The few families that actually immigrated there did so mostly prior to 1815. These men tended to be somewhat aristocratic and if anyone was likely to import French hounds, it was these guys. I'd love to see evidence that they did bring hounds, but so far I haven't seen any. The other group, and far more in numbers, were the Caribbean French. These creoles were also aristocratic and could have afforded to import hounds, but they immigrated here as 2nd and 3rd generation sugar planters from the Caribbean Islands. I know they imported voodoo, gumbo, and gris-gris, but no Gascons. I've never heard of a hound culture in the Islands. Of course the most famous French immigrants to Louisiana were the Cajuns, but they were not really French at all. They were Acadians from Nova Scotia and in Canada they were almost universally farmers and fishermen. The same pursuits they still maintain largely today. They were of a soci-economic class that was most likely to have a hound culture, yet that culture never seems to have developed.
Even the most famous Louisiana houndsman of all time, Ben Lilly, lived in Morehouse Parish in extreme northeastern Louisiana, where the population is almost exclusively of Scots-Irish descent. I know that the great tree hound breeds originated in France, but historically, in this country at least, it's the Anglos who seemed to have the hound culture locked down. I wonder why?