THE LOUP-GAROU LEGENDS
OF OLD VINCENNES

lthough scholars cannot agree when French fur traders, adventurers, and pioneers first settled in what now is Vincennes, Indiana, these hardy souls surely arrived in this small town near the Wabash River sometime during or before the early 18th century. Wherever the French wandered in the New World, their folktales came with them, and occasionally stayed to be collected by folklorists. As late as the 1930s a group of writers with the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration discovered a handful of Vincennes French descendants in their seventies and eighties who remembered the French oral traditions of their ancestors. These writers recorded some of the folk tales of a culture that was important to the development of the United States. A copy of the unpublished WPA manuscript is shelved in the Lewis Historical Library at Vincennes University. Fortunately, folklorist Ronald L. Baker has published some of the 277-page WPA manuscript as French Folklife In Old Vincennes (Terre Haute: Indiana Council of Teachers of English, Hoosier Folklore Society, 1989). Baker explains that storytelling was one of the main forms of entertainment of the French at social gatherings and in the home. Baker notes that a popular figure in these stories is the frightening loup-garou, or werewolf:

The loup-garou, to most who believed in him, was a fierce werewolf, though in Vincennes, as in New York, the loup-garou may also be a person transformed into a cow, horse, or some other animal. Once under a spell as a loup-garou, the unfortunate victim became an enraged animal that roamed each night through the fields and forests for a certain period of time, usually 101 days. During the day, he returned to his human form, though he was continually morose and sickly and fearful to tell of his predicament lest even a worse sentence should befall him. The main way he could be released from the spell before serving the stipulated time was for someone to recognize him as a person transformed to an animal and somehow draw blood from the loup-garou. Even when the disenchantment had been performed, both the victim and his rescuer could not mention the incident, even to each other, until the time was up. Anyone who violated this tabu would become possessed immediately and face a much stiffer sentence. (34)

The following are loup-garou and other supernatural tales collected in the 1920s by Miss Anna C. O'Flynn, who taught school for many years in the old French section of Vincennes. They have been transcribed and mildly edited by me from the unpublished Vincennes WPA manuscript entitled The Creole (French) Pioneers at Old Post Vincennes: A Product of Federal Writers' Project District #5 (Vincennes Office), by Doyle Joyce, Loy Followell, Elizabeth Kargacos, Bernice Mutchmore, and Paul R. King, circa 1937. The tales were told to Miss O'Flynn by French descendant Pepe Boucher, who favored the use of French Creole dialect.

NOTE: See American Life Histories: Manuscripts From the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-40 for 2,900 full-text WPA documents, including many from Indiana. The Vincennes manuscript does not yet seem to be among the ones listed.

The following is a reprinted newspaper article concerning the Old French interest in tales of witchcraft in Vincennes.

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