The Pirogue, a Half-Assed History

A lesson on a dying language, African mariners, and duck hunting with elbow grease

For 50 dollars and a handshake agreement on Facebook Marketplace, I can get you the most versatile boat an outdoorsman will ever use.

It can’t hold a motor. There’s no live well, fish finder or trolling motor. You’d be excused for calling it a canoe. Hell, sometimes they’re used just to hold boiled crawfish in. 

It’s a pirogue, and its pronunciation is debated throughout the marshes in which is it is used. Hiram “Hank” Williams pronounced it PEE-ROW in his 1952 hit, “Jambalaya,” as do Johnny Horton and Doug Kershaw in their respective discography. All of these songs are references to life in the most southern parishes of Louisiana.

Yet over the last 15 years of my life, I hear the term PEE-ROG used extensively, an English bastardization of a French word. To be fair, Cajun French is bastardized French, a language that morphed from the Acadian communities that dotted south Louisiana. 

In that sense, the term “pirogue” is bastardized, as well. If you ask ten Cajuns to draw a pirogue, it would be reasonable to expect six different boats to come from the assignment. Some would be made of wood, with one to two bench seats with exposed planks underneath for a floor. Others would draw a picture of a long, hollowed-out vessel that looks more akin to a log than a boat. These dugouts are the earliest version of a pirogue and are made out of bald cypress. Others may choose an aluminum rig, similar to a scaled-down laffite skiff with a set of curved gunwales at about the midway point.

Chase Cook paddles his pirogue through a marsh in south Louisiana. True to the author’s lede in this post, he bought it for 50 dollars on Facebook Marketplace in 2022. Photo by Ryne Berthelot

If you asked me? It’s about 14 feet long, made of fiberglass, with two bench seats. It’ll have a handle on the inside of the bow and stern for easy transportation. It’ll also have a series of scratches on the bottom from years of scraping over branches, cypress knees, and downed logs in the water. It’ll be light enough to flip over and dump any water out but can carry myself, my gear, and three dozen decoys to whatever patch of roseau cane that I find interesting that morning. Sometimes, I’ll use it strictly as an oversized decoy sled. 

They all share just one feature, though: They’re all shallow-drafting boats. Extremely shallow. 

The way a pirogue slices through the shallows of a marsh is unparalleled. The chine parts the blanket of still water and leaves behind silken ripples, as if they would be soft to the touch. There’s a raw elegance to the pirogue; There’s no more versatile a tool for those who lived along the bayous of south Louisiana, and it breeds memories of a time when settlers lived in harmony with the land. 

As are many things Cajuns deem culturally important, the pirogue isn’t exclusive to the region, though the minute details differentiate the cajun pirogue from all others; They’re used primarily as one-man vessels, sometimes two. They’re meant to be used in conjunction with a single-blade paddle, no oars or sails, which would make manuevreing through the thin trenasses of a marsh much more frustrating. 

I can remember the first time I hauled my pirogue across state lines.

It rode nearly 3000 miles roundtrip in the back of my four-wheel drive Nissan Frontier to Cibola NWR in my quest for a cinnamon teal, where it saw use as a workbench after a faulty shell stuffed a wad in my Winchester Super X3, and as a means of transportation down a cattail slough no more than 30 yards wide.

One morning, though, I let it sit in the back of my truck in the parking lot while I hunted a flooded millet field, no more than knee deep. 

When I returned, a trio of hunters stood, hands on hips, enjoying the spectacle that lay in the back of my truck. After a hasty introduction, I learned the three twenty-somethings were from California, making their occasional pilgrimage to better hunting grounds across state lines. One of them, sporting a scraggly, sandy-blonde beard and a pair of wayfarers more often seen at the beach than in a duck blind, asked the burning question.

“Where did you get this canoe,” he asked with a curious inflection in his voice.

I had to stop myself for a moment.

How was I supposed to correct him? Where do I start?

I finally found the words I was looking for. 

“It’s not a canoe. It’s a floating saucer.”