Most of Louisiana's story gets told from the bayou — water, cypress, moss. But north and west of Lafayette, the bayou gives way to open prairie: flat rice-farming land across St. Landry, Evangeline, and Allen parishes that looks nothing like the swamp Louisiana projects to the world. The Cajun Prairie is where the ground was drier, where German and Creole influences shaped a culture distinct from the bayou story, and where accordion and fiddle traditions held long after other parts of Acadiana moved on. Crowley, founded on this wet prairie in 1886, became the Rice Capital of America. Eunice, forty miles northwest of Lafayette, is where Cajun French is still spoken in the streets. In Mamou, Fred's Lounge has broadcast live Cajun music on Saturday mornings for decades. The tourism industry sells the swamp. The prairie is where the farming and the music stayed tangled together long enough to become something people still show up for.
