"Do not gamble. Do not drink whiskey."

You'll end up like Euzebe Vidrine if you do. That was Vidrine's warning before he was hanged in Ville Platte in 1924. I read in the Evangeline Parish Library's blog how an original copy of his biography was recently archived and better copies made, including a CD. Vidrine tells his story of growing up in Evangeline Parish, getting married, working at several different jobs, robbing and killing people. He explains how he felt when he killed people and tries to understand why he did it. It seems that drinking too much whiskey caused a lot of his problems.

Vidrine couldn't speak English well and he couldn't write. He told his story to a writer. You have to wonder how much of what you're reading was the writer's imagination and what was Vidrine's actual story. And then again, Vidrine could have made some of it up too. It ends with a poem by Tennyson. Regardless, The Life of Euzebe Vidrine is interesting to read - the events took place in south Louisiana during the 1920s among the French speaking people in the area.

Here's a short quote from Vidrine's story:

"So we started to Kaplan in a Ford car; he didn't have his chains on. When we got to the muddy road, he stopped to put on his chains; I was holding the flashlight and he was putting the the chains on; when he was putting the second chain, I was just itching to kill. I could feel the devil urging me on, so I shot him in the head with a 32-caliber pistol; he fell on his back."

The Evangeline Parish Library has the Ville Platte Gazette on microfilm and you can read the newspaper coverage of the story. I believe they also have the Opelousas Daily World on microfilm in the 1920s. I know Alexandria's Town Talk covered the story and the main library in Alexandria has microfilmed copies of the Town Talk.