Landmark History & Heritage The Spanish Lake Basin is one of the most historic spots in America. Beginning 100,000 years ago, river systems built up a high terrace, or ridge, around the basin's geologic "bowl" of soil and water.
Some 8,000 years ago, native people camped on this ridge and collected clams from the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico, which lapped against our prehistoric bluff for thousands of years. Hunters chased mastodons into lush woodlands across bayous and rivers and eventually settled here to enjoy the abundant food and waterway trade routes. By at least 4,000 B.C.E. people were living on the "high land" ridge nearly encircling the present-day Spanish Lake Basin.
By 2,000 B.C.E., native people were paddling their cypress canoes upriver to trade with tribes in other villages and ceremonial centers. From 500 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E., people lived in a large village on the north bank of Bayou Manchac and governed other tribes from this regional seat of political power, just as Baton Rouge governs the state of Louisiana today.
In the basin's swamps and bayous the native people found everything they needed: palmetto leaves to build huts, cypress to make canoes and drums, cane for darts and arrow shafts tipped with gar scales, bows carved out of pecan trees found on higher land nearby. The people shared their knowledge of the land with the early settlers, teaching them to build their wood and mud houses with moss and to make pottery and cooking implements with the sharkey clay of the bayous.
The two earliest explorers from Spain and France, Hernando de Soto and LaSalle, paddled past the lush hidden basin in 1542 and 1682. It wasn't until 1699 that native people showed a French Canadian navigator, Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d'Iberville, a waterway trade route winding through the wild beauty and magnificent, sprawling oak trees growing along the basin's high ridge.
On March 25, 1699, Iberville camped overnight at the confluence of Alligator Bayou and Bayou Manchac. This was probably the "fish place," or "Anatamaha," noted on early maps, a landing where alligators gathered to feast on the plentiful fish migrating from the basin along Alligator Bayou into Bayou Manchac.
Iberville wrote the following passage in his diary:
"This place where I am is one of the prettiest spots I have seen, fine level ground, beautiful woods, clear and bare of canes..."
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