Wicked Mobile

In the winter of 1866, Mobile was a broken city. It had managed to escape the long Civil War without the physical pounding inflicted on so many other southern cities, but the economy was in tatters.

Prosperous and booming from a vibrant cotton trade on the eve of the conflict, the Union blockade and deprivation from the war had taken a heavy toll. The war interrupted virtually every aspect of civic life, including the city’s famous love affair with frivolity.

Since the 1830s, social organizations had thrilled crowds on New Year’s Eve with elaborate parades. With most young men fighting for the Confederate army and the rest of the city supporting the war effort, those parades had been suspended.

The year 1866 was, according to the book Chasin’ the Devil Round a Stump, a “year of doom for [the] Southland.”

Amidst this despondence, Joseph Stillwell Cain stepped forward to lift the city’s spirits. With six Confederate War veterans, dressed in Confederate uniforms, Joe Cain appeared with a charcoal wagon marching through the streets to the delight of the people and the shock of occupying soldiers from the Union army.

Cain had spent the previous Fat Tuesday in New Orleans and watched with admiration as revelers celebrated Mardi Gras. He returned to Mobile determined to spread the tradition to his hometown.

Cain dressed in Chickasaw Indian clothing, a fur skirt and deerskins, and wore long Chickasaw-style hair under headdress. The tribe had been carefully chosen, as it never had been defeated in battle, the perfect symbol for embarrassing Union soldiers who still occupied the city. Cain called his character Chief Slacabamorinico, and the group made raucous music as it marched.

Joe Cain dressed as a Chickasaw Indian, Chief Slacabamorinico, and marched through the streets of Mobile, reviving Mardi Gras after the Civil War. Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

To a humiliated city, it was a subtle act of defiance in the face of occupiers. Cain, after all, could not wave a rebel flag in front of the troops. During the parade, many Mobilians invited them into their homes.

“It meant a whole people could still look up—look up in pride—and still keep going on,” states Chasin’ the Devil.

And that is how Mobile’s modern Mardi Gras celebration started. Cain returned the following Fat Tuesday dressed in a tall, plumed hat and red knee boots with spurs. He and his band called themselves the Lost Cause Minstrels, and their parade drew a trail of delighted children.

By 1868, Cain was accompanied by sixteen Confederate veterans, including future judge Oliver Semmes, the son of Confederate admiral Raphael Semmes. The Order of Myths (OOM), Mobile’s oldest current Mardi Gras organization, joined the celebration that year.

At least, that’s the legend. That’s the version every Mobilian, from native son to transplant, learns. It has been repeated in scores of books, newspapers and magazine articles over the decades.

Mobile author and folklorist Julian “Judy” Rayford persuaded Joe Cain’s grandson to consent to exhuming the Mardi Gras legend’s remains from a family plot in Bayou La Batre and reburying them in the historic Church Street Graveyard in downtown Mobile. Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Shoddy and inconsistent record keeping about a topic as frivolous as Mardi Gras, combined with Mobile’s many fires, make it impossible to determine the accurate history of the city’s most famous Carnival icon.

The real Joe Cain was a minor Mardi Gras figure before the 1962 publication of Chasin’ the Devil Round a Stump. That work marked the zenith of author Julian Lee “Judy” Rayford’s long effort to elevate Cain’s stature. He based his story on an oral history culled from interviews with old Mobilians and Cain’s surviving relatives.

He was given to hyperbole, suggesting that Cain “was a genuinely great man, the greatest man in the entire sweep of Mobile’s history.”

The historical evidence of the legend is remarkably scant, however. Newspaper accounts in 1866 on Ash Wednesday—the start of the Catholic Lenten period—contained no mention of Cain or mischievous merriment. The story was much the same in 1867.

It was not until 1868 that contemporaneous news accounts mention any sort of Fat Tuesday celebration. And it was the newly formed Order of Myths that received top billing. It noted Mobile’s long tradition of elaborate New Year’s Eve parades but stated that Fat Tuesday had been “unnoted” previously.

“The ‘Order of Myths’ have changed all this, and henceforth, no doubt, Mardi-Gras will be looked forward to with an anxiety as eager as that which attends upon New Year’s Eve,” reported the February 26, 1868 edition of the Mobile Daily Register.

The article reported that rain on Monday and Tuesday had made the dirt streets muddy and sloppy. Still, the paper stated, people enjoyed the parade and its theme, Lalla Rookh, based on the nineteenth-century Eastern romance by Thomas Moore.

The parade began on Royal Street at 8:30 p.m. It was preceded by the Lost Cause Minstrels, but the Register’s account made no mention of Cain or his alter ego, Chief Slacabamorinico.

“Early in the evening much curiosity and merriment was caused by the appearance of the Minstrel band of the L.C.’s—the society, itself, from, some cause or other, not turning out,” the article states.

The paper’s only reference to Cain was in an article describing a party held that night by the Washington Steam Fire Engine Company No. 8, of which he was a member. That gathering was hosted by J.B. Reilly, who had won a pair of horses in a fire company raffle.

“A large amount of champagne was quaffed, and the gentlemen present enjoyed themselves largely,” the paper reported.

Pegging the start of Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebration at 1866—or even 1867—just doesn’t jibe with existing historical documentation, Cain’s own recollections notwithstanding.

Mobile journalist Steve Joynt, who has extensively researched the city’s Mardi Gras origins, uncovered convincing evidence that Cain was not even in Mobile on Mardi Gras Day 1867. He cites an article from the New Orleans Times on March 4 of that year listing visitors from Mobile expected to attend the annual parade commemorating the founding of New Orleans Fireman’s Charitable Association.

The parade was held on the same date every year, and it happened to coincide with the day before Fat Tuesday in 1867. Cain himself wrote of staying for the Mardi Grad festivities the day following the fireman’s parade and returning home determined to bring the tradition to Mobile.

“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 it was announced in the Mobile Daily Tribune of that period,” he wrote in a newspaper article printed near the end of his life (although he mistakenly indicated that the year was 1866).

Mardi Gras myth holds that Joe Cain and his fellow Confederate military veterans participated in the first Fat Tuesday celebration. The others who accompanied Cain may have been veterans, but Cain was not. Records on file at the Alabama Department of Archives and History show that he received an exemption from military service due to his vital role as clerk of the city’s Southern Market.

At various points, Cain has been mentioned as the first Folly character to ride on the OOM emblem float and the inspiration for Dave Levi’s decision to found the Comic Cowboys, a Mobile Mardi Gras satire group that has been skewering politicians and riffing the news every Fat Tuesday since 1884. Both claims also almost assuredly are untrue.

Mobilians jealously guard their status as the nation’s Mardi Gras birthplace. The city traces those origins to shortly after its 1702 founding by French explorers. The Frenchmen had celebrated the holiday of their homeland at Fort Maurepas in what is now Ocean Springs, Mississippi. The settlers did not mark the season in 1702 because they were so busy transferring the colonial capital from Fort Maurepas to the Mobile River. But celebrations returned the following year with a few people donning masks and painting their faces red.

The Société de la Saint Louis formed in 1704 in the city’s previous location on the Twenty Seven Mile Bluff. Dancing, eating and excessive drinking had become part of the festivities by 1705.

In 1711, a French soldier named Nicolas L’Anglois founded the Boeuf Gras Society, which celebrated Shrove Tuesday, or the day before Lent. The Carnival society celebrated with a giant bull’s head pushed on wheels on Royal and Dauphin Streets. Eventually, the bull’s head was replaced by a papier-mâché version imported from France.

The frolic would conclude with a ball and banquet at one of the city’s finer hotels.

Modern celebrations in Mobile, with intricate floats, trace to the 1830s; like Joe Cain, their beginnings are an inseparable mix of fact and legend.

Michael Krafft, a young Bristol, Pennsylvania–born cotton broker, is said to have been dining with friends at La Tourette’s restaurant on Conti and Water Streets on New Year’s Eve in 1830—or, in some versions, 1831—when inspiration struck. After much food and drink, the group left and walked two blocks north and one block east until it reached a hardware store.

The store’s name varies in different accounts. But it involves Krafft and the others grabbing rakes, hoes and cowbells from the outside the shop and then making a racket as they marched through the city, stopping to party inside various homes as they went.

“This coterie—partly in reply to an impertinence and more in sheer bravado—stole a splendid turkey hen from an old Creole restaurant keeper which had been fattening for a feast,” journalist T.C. de Leon wrote in a 1911 account. “This they carried her and she never recognized it until they confessed.”

The group ended up at the home of Mayor John Stocking Jr. at the corner of Government and Franklin Streets. From de Leon’s version: “So jovial was the party under holiday hearths that they decided to serenade the Mayor.”

Charles Kennerly, who purportedly was among the marchers that evening, provided this alternate account in 1870: “The participants were wholly unconscious of what an institution they were inaugurating.”

The day after Christmas, Captain Joseph Post was aboard his ship on Government Street Wharf. Christmas day fell on a Sunday. He found Michael Krafft, who went to the Commerce and Conti Streets corner hardware store of Joseph Hall.

Krafft sat in the doorway and accidentally dislodged a rake, and a string of cowbells fell down on top of him. He gathered them and tied them to the teeth of the rake. Someone asked, “Hello, Mike—what society is this?”

Commission merchant James Taylor joined, as did others. They found a half-starved mule and mounted it, riding him to a drinking house on Exchange Alley. They met up with “the boys” at the clothing store of E.R. Dickerson on Dauphin Street and made their dress, in the words of Kennerly, “as grotesque as possible.”

Forty to fifty people formed a line at about 9:00 p.m. and ran into a messenger of Mayor Stocking, who invited them to his home. Eventually, the merrymakers moved on to the home of George Davis.

“But having partaken so largely of the Mayor’s hospitality, we could do but little more than nibble at the viends and sip a little of his wine,” Kennerly wrote.

Kennerly wrote that Krafft’s frolic would have ended that year if it were not for Taylor, who led the New Year’s activities. After Krafft died of yellow fever in 1839, one observer said, “Never until now have I seen a tombstone with a joke for an epitaph.”

By then, the tradition Krafft helped start was fully entrenched. The Cowbellion de Rakin Society ran from 1831 to 1887, holding its last parade in 1880. The group’s last banquet took place in 1912.

New Orleanians and Mobilians have argued for decades over which city has rightful claim to the nation’s first Mardi Gras. Undoubtedly, New Orleans was the first city to stage elaborate parades on Fat Tuesday. But the concept of those elaborate parades came straight from Mobile’s New Year’s celebrations.

Samuel Manning Todd, a native of Utica, New York, came to Mobile in the 1830s and served as city treasurer and comptroller. He was active in the Cowbellions and exported that tradition to New Orleans in 1854. Brothers Joseph and William P. Ellison spent time in Mobile before moving to New Orleans. Joe Ellison held meetings for the “formation of an association similar to the Cowbellions of Mobile.”

So Mobile invented the parades with floats, New Orleans moved the concept to the pre-Lenten Carnival season and Mobile followed suit. It is a circular relationship that binds both cities.

He was born on October 10, 1832, on the north side of Dauphin Street between Warren and Cedar Streets. He lived on Spring Hill Avenue in a neighborhood that once was home to the old Central Market. His parents, Irish immigrants, were Quakers from Philadelphia.

Parents Joseph and Julia Ann Cain came to Alabama by wagon in about 1825. Son Joe Cain worked as a cotton broker and held a number of public positions over the years, including coroner, the city’s inspector of naval stores and clerk of the Southern Market. He fell in love with Elizabeth Rabby when he already was engaged to another woman. Before he could pursue Elizabeth, he first needed to perform the unpleasant task of breaking off his first engagement. In true Joe Cain fashion, here is how he pulled it off.

Pretending to be drunk, he staggered around during a fashionable ball. His mortified fiancée broke off the engagement herself. And her parents told him never to “darken our door again.”

Cain could be stern. His grandson Benny Thomas told Rayford about the time he got caught skinny-dipping at a mill at the foot of Eslava Street. The judge agreed to waive the fine if the boy’s family would whip him. Joe Cain, by then an older man, walked the four blocks to the jail to retrieve his grandson.

Another time, Benny lied when Cain confronted him about a cherry he had taken from a tree in the backyard. Cain beat him with a barrel stove.

Cain’s love of a good party is not in dispute, however. He was barely a teenager when he helped found the Tea Drinkers Society in 1846. They called themselves “The Determined Set,” or TDS. The Tea Drinkers name comes from the group’s slogan that they “never drank anything as weak as tea.”

The group participated in Mobile’s New Year’s Eve festivities. Its last parade was in 1883. During the organization’s golden anniversary, the organization paid tribute to Cain with a golden walking stick and a fine beaver hat. He was the group’s last surviving founder.

Whatever the truth was about the date Cain first donned his Indian costume, the legend was in full swing by the middle of the next decade. An 1874 newspaper features a drawing of a lunatic with upraised arms holding large drumsticks over a drum labeled “L.C. Minstrel Band.” It invites revelers to celebrate with Chief Slacabamorinico, who would journey from Wragg Swamp: “Old Slac and his boys—and heavy dogs they are!—emerge from the ground between one and 2:00 p.m. on Mardi Gras…This year, Old Slac invites all maskers, horse, wagon, foot, and dragons to join him in one grand procession through the city, the route and hour will be given at the proper time.”

Cain’s reputation survived his death. As grandson Benny told Rayford, “Every time Mardi Gras came, after he died, folks’d say, ‘He ain’t here, but he’d sure enjoy it if he was here.’”

Cain moved to Bayou La Batre, south of Mobile, to live with one of his sons in 1885 but remained clerk of the Southern Market until 1900. He died four years later at the age of seventy-two. An obituary in the Mobile Item called him “‘the father’ of Mobile’s Myths.”

Despite the fame in his own time, Cain’s name seemed destined to fade into history before Julian Rayford.

Mardi Gras in Mobile during the 1960s had declined in importance. Booths had been banned in Bienville Square, along with mule-drawn floats and Cracker Jacks. Rayford believed the spontaneity had been drained from the holiday. He dreamed of a conversation with Joe Cain on a bench in the city park.

“I just wanted to make people laugh, they were so sad after the war,” Cain told Rayford in the dream.

Rayford made it his life’s work to raise Cain’s profile. He wore down Cain’s grandson Vance for years until finally convincing him to sign the papers allowing for Cain’s body to be exhumed and buried in Mobile’s Church Street Graveyard on February 6, 1967. The Excelsior Band, a Mobile Mardi Gras fixture since the nineteenth century, played “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Master of Ceremonies Martin Johnson said, “I commend his soul to the Maker, who most dearly loves such bright spirits as Joe Cain, father of modern Mardi Gras in our old city.”

After it came to light that the family plot was in another spot of the cemetery, Cain’s body was dug up a second time.

The real Joe Cain held a variety of public positions, including clerk of the Southern Market. He was a volunteer firefighter and a renowned partier. Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library.