Last Days of Last Island: The Hurricane of 1856, Louisiana’s First Great Storm – Book Review

A 1953 advertisement from the Planter’s Banner in Franklin, La., touts the newly opened Last Island Hotel as a “most agreable [sic] summer retreat” with “unrivalled [sic] fishing and sea-bathing facilities…well stocked Bar, Billiards and Bowling saloons.” If that sounds idyllic, it was. For three years the hotel—mounted on the Gulf Coast at Isle Dernier, a thin hook of beach and woods curving into Caillou Bay southwest of New Orleans—was a celebrated retreat for upper-class merchants, landowners and power players of antebellum Louisiana. It was where the wealthy forefathers of our state decamped to get away from the hustle of the Crescent City or the humidity and creeping familiarity of their own plantations. The party ended in 1856, when a category four hurricane ravaged the island and wiped this pristine getaway clear off the coastline, leaving its 400 visitors either adrift in remote bayous or dead.

Like any number of the quality reads published about the causes, effects, heroes and villains of Hurricane Katrina or the sinking of the Titanic, Last Days of Last Island not only retells with precision the details of a disaster, but reveals the character of everyday people who faced—at the time—unprecedented and largely unforeseen obstacles. Researched and written by Bill Dixon and published by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, Last Days offers an often sweeping and colorful look at the people of pre-Civil War Louisiana. There’s the crew of the Houma-born vessel Ceres who first suspected the oncoming storm based on the unusual movements of seagulls. Alfred Duprerier is also discussed, who used time aboard his rescue boat—a steamship called Major Aubrey—to pen the first detailed list of victims and survivors of the horrific disaster.

Last Days is a fascinating examination of a people in peril and those who came to their aid. Dixon’s footnoted narrative will make history buffs giddy and serve as a reminder to all that though Louisiana may have escaped the eye of the hurricane this year, the next time it is struck, it will be the people—be they neighbors or strangers—who will help us through the storm.