ALABAMA: HEART OF DIXIE
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How Mobile’s Modern Mardi Gras Got Its Start
By The Mobile Mask
Historians and others can argue about which group
of early explorers first hoisted a drink on Shrove Tuesday, yelled “Happy Mardi
Gras!” then fell down and whether they were closer to the present locations of
Mobile, Alabama, or New Orleans, Louisiana, when they did it.
It seems like such a small point.
It’s far more interesting to explore the events
that led directly to the Mardi Gras we know: the secret societies, the
high-class balls, the elaborate parades, the tons of throws.
And all of that has to start in Mobile on the day
after Christmas 1831. A captain whose ship was tied up in Mobile invited a
young cotton broker named Michael Krafft to enjoy dinner with him aboard ship,
according to an account written by Charles Kennerly, who described Krafft as “a
fellow of infinite jest and was fond of fun of any kind.”
After dinner, as Krafft made his way home through
the dark streets of Mobile, he came upon a hardware store. “For some reason or
other,” Kennerly wrote, “Krafft sat down in the doorway, and in so doing, his
head … dislodged (a) rake and string of cowbells. They came rattling down on
him, whereat he gathered up the bells and tied them, bell by bell, to the teeth
of the rake.”
Krafft resumed his trip home with the jangling rake.
“This extraordinary spectacle, of course, attracted the attention of ‘the
boys,’ and by the time (Krafft) had reached Royal Street, he had a crowd around
him.” Someone asked Krafft, “What society is this?”
“Michael, giving his rake an extra shake and looking
up at his bells,” Kennerly wrote, “responded, ‘This? This is the Cowbellion de
Rakin Society.’ ”
There have been many versions of this story written and rewritten,
told and retold, but Kennerly’s is likely the closest to true, since he was one
of the original Cowbellions. According to him, Krafft’s harmless little
escapade and witty retort wound up in the area newspapers right away, and the
papers openly speculated on whether the Cowbellions would show up again on New
Year’s Eve.
It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Folks turned
out on New Year’s Eve to see what would happen, Kennerly among them. He joined
40 to 60 men who gathered at “the place of rendezvous,” a coffee house in
Exchange Alley. The men were “formed and put in line of march about nine
o’clock. Having got into the street, we were met by a messenger from the mayor,
John Stocking, who invited us to call at his residence and partake of a collation.”
The band of men did go to the mayor’s residence,
where they were fed, and they stopped at several other residences. They had a
grand time. “I had no expectation of hearing anything more of the matter,”
Kennerly wrote, but nearly a year later, “I saw in the papers a notice calling
the Cowbellions together at the appointed time.”
The Cowbellions indeed continued on. By 1833,
according to historian Julian “Judy” Rayford, the men paraded in masks and
fancy costumes, and many were on horseback. In 1840, the Cowbellions presented
a parade of six floats – “the first of their kind in the United States,”
Rayford wrote – with the theme “Heathen Gods and Goddesses.” Krafft never saw
the grand spectacle, as he died of yellow fever in 1839.
The Cowbellions grew into the country’s first
mystic society, a secret and exclusive group that existed solely for the purpose
of parading and throwing elaborate parties. The Cowbellions begat the Strikers,
a group of younger men who, apparently, could not earn admission into the
Cowbellions. A third group, known only as T.D.S. (though folks sarcastically
referred to them as the Tea Drinkers Society), formed, and its original members
included a young man named Joseph Stillwell Cain.
All of these groups paraded on New Year’s Eve.
In 1857, six Mobile men who had moved to New Orleans
decided to form a Mardi Gras mystic society. These men had been members of the
Cowbellions, though one of them was later said by Joe Cain to have been a
former Striker. Together, they formed the Mystick Krewe of Comus, which
presented the first Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans, literally reviving the
holiday in that city.
According to David Bagwell, an attorney and Mardi
Gras historian in Fairhope, Alabama, the Strikers received an invitation to the
first Comus ball.
Less than 10 years later, Joe Cain went to New
Orleans to see a parade. Cain, a clerk at the city of Mobile’s Old Southern
Market, wrote years later about his trip and the subsequent events:
“In 1866, Washington Fire Company No. 1 of Mobile,
of which I was a member, attended the annual parade of the New Orleans Fire
Department as the guests of Perseverance Fire Company No. 13. In that year,
Mardi Gras occurred on the fifth of March, the day after the parade of the Fire
Department. I appeared on the streets of New Orleans … in Mardi Gras costume
and was (on) the special car of No. 13. My experience on that occasion was so
pleasant that I determined on my return home that Mobile should have its own
Mardi Gras celebration, and so announced in the Mobile Daily Tribune of that
period.
“In 1867, the L.C. (Lost Cause) Minstrels,
organized by myself, made their first parade and created an immense
excitement.”
Cain’s account does much to leave himself out of the
spectacle, which is interesting, since every school-aged child in Mobile knows
the story of Joe Cain dressing up as an Indian chief and giving himself the
ridiculous name of Slacabamarinico. As the story goes, Old Slac drove a coal
wagon through town, trailed by the Lost Cause Minstrels, who were not musicians
at all, though they made quite a lot of noise with their homemade instruments.
What caused Cain to choose to portray an Indian chief, reportedly of the Alabama Chickasaw tribe? The answer may lie in the fact that when his New Year’s Eve group, T.D.S., paraded in 1855, the theme was “The Chiefs of the Principal Tribes of Alabama Indians.” Perhaps he used parts of the leftover costume from that parade for his famous ride of 1867.
In that same year, Mobile’s first and
still-parading Mardi Gras group, the Order of Myths was formed and presented
its first parade in 1868, with the theme “Lalla Rookh.”
One newspaper account from that year told of “the
Minstrel band of the L.C.’s” parading first. “The Minstrels, who were gotten up
as monkeys, were mounted upon a dilapidated wagon and discoursed wild and, we
must say, most discordant music. They were followed by large crowds of boys,
shouting and yelling, and presented a most ludicrous and laughable sight.”
Next, about 8:30 p.m., the OOM took to the
rain-soaked streets.According to the same newspaper account, the Order of Myths
“presented a gay and animated appearance and were enlivened by crowds of men
and boys masked and most fantastically dressed.”
Mardi Gras in Mobile had officially begun, and it
would grow at a tremendous rate. A second group, known only as H.S.S. formed in
1869 and first paraded in 1870. By 1873, H.S.S. was bankrupt, and the remaining
members reformed as the Infant Mystics, which still parades today.
Though it has been reported – namely by Rayford –
that Joe Cain was somehow part of the formation of the OOM, Bagwell wrote
definitively that he was not. Cain did, however, have some connection with the
Infant Mystics. In that group’s own written history, it says that after the
first I.M. parade in 1874, “Joe Cain was thanked for the use of his flats and
for his voluntary aid in forming and conducting their procession.”
By 1875 – just six years after the first OOM parade –
yet another parading group that still exists today, the Knights of Revelry, hit
the streets on Fat Tuesday, Feb. 9. One newspaper account of that day estimated
that 50,000 to 60,000 people were in the streets to enjoy the parades of seven
mystic societies.
The census count for Mobile in 1880 was only
29,132.
But what, Bagwell asked, became of the New Year’s
Eve societies, especially the famous Cowbellions? “Some Cows started joining
the OOM,” Bagwell wrote, “but most stayed in the Cows, too. By the end of the
1870s, about 16 percent of the Cows had joined another group, though most of them
also stayed in the Cows until the 1880s.”
So for more than 10 years, the residents of and
visitors to Mobile enjoyed elaborate parades on both New Year’s Eve and Mardi
Gras Day.
“For whatever reason, at the end of the 1880s –
certainly by the early 1890s – the Cows were never heard from publicly again,”
Bagwell wrote. “We know that the remaining Cows had a very rough draft
constitution in 1889 … but apparently it never quite got off the ground. By
then, the Cows were getting a little age on them and probably just dropped out
of parading life.
“Thus, Mobile mysticism moved from New Year’s Eve
to Mardi Gras.”
And for those wrapped up in the whole New Orleans
vs. Mobile argument, this much is clear: Modern Mardi Gras in New Orleans began
because of the influence of Mobile, and modern Mardi Gras in Mobile began
because of the influence of New Orleans.
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REFERENCE SITES:
I grew up in Mobile, Alabama -
somebody's got to be from Mobile, right? - and Mobile sits at the confluence of
five rivers, forming this beautiful delta. And the delta has alligators
crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with
snakes, birds of every flavor.
Mike deGruy
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