Within the panoply of “Greatest Generation” accounts rests a lesser-known but nonetheless inspirational story involving impacts of the Great Depression, World War II and the birth of post-war America.

What a mouthful.

But that story centers on the exploits of Cajuns who, by their wits and industry, helped promote home-front efforts by building the machinery of war. It happened in New Orleans with the manufacture of Higgins boats, landing craft that made coastal invasions possible for the Allies in WWII. It happened elsewhere in shipbuilding ports along the Gulf of Mexico.

And it happened in places like the Golden Triangle, in burgeoning cities like Orange and Port Arthur, where Louisiana Cajuns pushed west to build ships and staff petroleum refining plants, all crucial to the defeat of Axis powers Germany and Japan.

Independent scholar Jason Theriot tells the story in “The Migration of Cajuns to Southeast Texas,” a scholarly article in the current edition of Louisiana History, the Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association that’s headquartered at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Theriot contends the westward migration of Cajuns into the Golden Triangle not only strengthened Texas’ wartime industrial prowess, but also diversified and enriched its culture with the introduction of French-speaking people who brought their Catholic faith, Cajun food and musical traditions.

The effects of that cultural migration endure in a Texas region that retains French names and culture. By 2000, Theriot writes, as much as 30 percent of the Golden Triangle population consisted of Cajuns or Creoles or other people of French descent.

His study presents the Cajun migration as part of the larger story of some 15 million American wartime workers who migrated for defense-related jobs; in this case, a unique population that largely left the rural communities of the Louisiana coast for the burgeoning urban centers of Texas. In Southeastern Texas, that meant the Golden Triangle cities of Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange – the last of these a city whose population exploded to some 60,000 people, hard to imagine today with its population of under 20,000.

Those mostly French-speaking Cajuns brought with them to Texas valuable mechanical and welding skills, some of which were self-taught on farms, an insistent work ethic and the capacity to adapt, within their unique culture, to new circumstances. Culturally isolated in Louisiana, they became valued and sought-after workers in Texas and contribute still in their adopted state.

How did they do that? With the support of fellow Cajuns who made their own employment “beachheads” in Southeast Texas in the late 1930s and early 1940s and established themselves as such able employees that more Cajuns were sought as employees within Texas industry.

Theriot, citing Levingston Shipbuilding executive Larry Baker Sr.: “There were a number of them who could not read or write, but they could do you one heck of a job, because that’s what they did on the farm, with the rice and the sugarcane, they had to fix all these machines that were broke down and so forth.”

But the Cajuns brought more than raw ambition and dedication to task. They brought their food and culture, Theriot writes, which meant Cajun restaurants and “drip coffee.”

It meant the migration of music giants like Clifton Chenier, the Creole king of zydeco, who moved from Loreauville, Louisiana, to Port Arthur and Harry Choates, born in Cow Island, Louisiana, who lived and recorded a hit version of “Jole Blon” during his short and troubled life and career in Texas.

Theriot’s work tells much about why this corner of coastal Texas is replete with names like Breaux and Meaux and Cormier. It tells us much about why Texans embrace boudin and crawfish and red beans and rice.

Read for yourself in the Fall 2017 printing of Louisiana History, and learn much about Texas history in the process.

Ken Stickney is editor of the Port Arthur News.