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Carencro() (historically (フランス語:St.-Pierre)〔http://www.thecajuns.com/oldnew.htm〕) is a small city in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana. It is a suburb of the nearby city of Lafayette. The population was 6,120 at the 2000 census. Its name comes from the Cajun French word for buzzard: the spot was one where large flocks of buzzards roosted in the bald cypress trees. The name means "carrion crow." Carencro is part of the Lafayette Metropolitan Statistical Area. ==Etymology== Many senior Carencro natives attest that the town's name originates from before the American Civil War. According to this local legend, Native Americans told Vermilionville settlers that in old times a large number of "carrion crows" (vultures, called ''carencro'' in French) had settled around the Vermilion River between Lafayette and Opelousas, Louisiana to feast on a fish die-off. There is a related theory, consistent with the spelling, that the place is named for the ''carencro tête rouge'', a red-headed buzzard referred to by European explorers as early as 1699, and described in 1774 by Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz. Du Pratz described the bird as having black plumage and a head covered with red flesh. He said the Spanish government protected the birds, ''"for as they do not use the whole carcass of the buffaloes which (the Spaniards) kill, those birds eat what they leave, which otherwise, by rotting on the ground, would ... infect the air."'' 〔(Jim Bradshaw, "Carencro name comes from old Attakapas legend" ), ''Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser'', January 27, 1998.〕 In a letter written on April 23, 1802, Martin Duralde, a former commandant of the Opelousas post, related the legend as it had come down from an Attakapas Indian. Duralde wrote: "Many years before the discovery of the elephant in the bayou called an Attakapas savage had informed a man who is at present in my service in the capacity of cow-herd that the ancestors of his nation transmitted (the story) to their descendants that a beast of enormous size had perished either in this bayou or in one of the two water courses a short distance from it without their being able to indicate the true place, the antiquity of the event having without doubt made them forget it."(Note: The mastodon became extinct 4500-10,000 years ago, in part because of overhunting by American Indians.) A late 19th-century account stated the legend came from buzzards (vultures) feasting on a mastodon carcass. Its fossilized bones were reportedly discovered and collected by a French naturalist in the 18th century and shipped to the Jardin des Plantes of Paris, but the ship was wrecked on the way, and the bones were lost at sea. The only relic of the mastodon was a femur or leg bone, which was kept by an early settler, the first Guilbeau. He used it as a pestle to bruise indigo for processing, a crop then cultivated in the Attakapas Indian country. The Indians termed the birds ''carecros''; and from the spot where the mastodon died, the river takes the name of Bayou Carencro.〔("How Buzzard's Prairie Got Its Name" ), reprinted in the ''Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser'' from the ''Lafayette (LA) Gazette'', May 22, 1897.〕 First called St. Pierre, in the late 19th century, the town was renamed Carencro, after the "carrion crow" (vulture) legend. Although Carencro's current town center lies well west of the Vermilion River, this legend has permanence within the community. Some people think that the name comes from the Spanish ''carnero'', meaning "bone pile." This idea also comes from the mastodon legend, and the idea that the buzzards left nothing but a pile of white bones after they had picked the mastodon clean.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Carencro, Louisiana」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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