The Teche, at the western edge of the basin and paralleling the Atchafalaya, has been spared the salvation wreaked on the river, even though, before roads came, the little Teche—not the Atchafalaya—was the highway from the Gulf into the heart of Louisiana. Half of the eighteenth-century settlements in the state lay along or very near the Teche: St. Martinville, Lafayette, Opelousas, New Iberia. The Teche was navigable for more than a hundred miles. Indians put dugouts on it; Spanish adventurers and French explorers floated it in cypress-trunk pirogues (some displacing fifty tons); settlers
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