[3] A part of the central wetlands system that ran from the Lower 9th Ward all the way to Lake Borgne, today only roughly 400 acres remain of the once thriving cypress swamp.

Under French rule, the enslaved population included indigenous peoples as well as Africans brought to the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade.

Maroons lived alongside Indigenous communities that were there before them, like the Chitimacha and Choctaw Tribes and Acadians, who had arrived when Britain colonized Canada.

These societies developed various techniques for living in the wetland environment without damaging it, including raised housing, small watercraft-like pirogues, and a new cuisine of alligator and turtles.

After Saint Malo's capture and subsequent execution, Maroon communities were largely driven out of the greater New Orleans area, including Bayou Bienvenue, by the late 1700s.

Two officers, disguised as locals, had found the one bayou leading from Lake Bourgne to the Mississippi River that the Creoles, ignoring Jackson’s repeated orders, had failed to block.

Suitably named Bienvenue, it had welcomed (with an assist from the smaller Bayou Mazant and a connecting canal) the midnight passage of General Keane, 2,080 men, and two guns to firm ground on the Villeré plantation along the Mississippi.

In the 1920s, the dredging and installation of locks creating the Industrial Canal, which connected Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River, marked the beginning of the man-made interference that lead to the eventual demise of the Bayou Bienvenue cypress swamp.

"[10] Today a "ghost swamp", the only visible remnants of the Bayou before its man-made destruction are the skeleton-like, limbless trunks of the dead cypress trees rising out of the brackish water.