COLUMN ONE : Weathering the Storm, Cajun-Style : Residents of the bayous called on two centuries of coping with adversity and stood fast when Hurricane Andrew blew through. As in the past, they quickly rallied to help each other.

With windows smashed and merchandise vulnerable to anyone walking down the street, only those who live here are unsurprised at the lack of looting in this town of 10,000 after the devastation of Hurricane Andrew.

“We’re family here,” Dan Darden said Thursday as he stood outside his ruined furniture store waving to passersby and calling them by their first names. “Cajuns are very close, strong-knit and tight.”

Hurricane Andrew’s first landfall in the United States was Miami, a polyglot city of new immigrants often described as a metropolis of the 21st Century.

But when the storm swept across the Gulf of Mexico into the low-lying swamplands and bayous of southern Louisiana, it brought its destruction to a region populated by descendants of 18th-Century immigrants.

Known locally as Acadiana and more widely as Cajun country, this isolated, dank area is dominated by descendants of French refugees and freed slaves. The first French settlers arrived in 1765 after being turned away from Colonial America, and many still live on farms and ranches founded in the wilderness by their ancestors more than two centuries ago.

The roots of these Cajuns are deep, giving them loyalty to family and land that could not be blown away by the 150-m.p.h. winds of Andrew or the countless storms that preceded it. In Andrew’s aftermath, it is that sense of community that is helping people here rebuild their homes and lives.

“Nothing is going to run us out of here,” said Oray Rogers, whose family arrived in the Franklin area more than two centuries ago and who boasts that he knows everyone in Franklin--or at least their daddies--by their names.

The absence of looting was not unique to Franklin, where the three-block historic district suffered major damage when the hurricane passed over in the early morning hours Wednesday.

State and local police reported no serious crime despite totally darkened towns and the widespread damage.

“A lot of people have been watching other people’s stuff,” said State Police Sgt. Hamilton Mixon. “These are big country towns, and everybody knows everybody.”

When Gov. Edwin W. Edwards dispatched 48 National Guardsmen to Morgan City on Tuesday, the police chief wasn’t sure what to do with them. Mayor Cedric LaFleur told him to put them to work cleaning up if they were not needed to patrol the streets.

“We’ve been through these storms before and we’ll be OK,” said LaFleur.

The essential character of life has changed little in South Louisiana since the first ancestors of today’s Cajuns arrived. The area is still rural, sparsely populated and poor. Agriculture and fishing are the main industries, particularly since the oil and gas business has gone sour in recent years.

People are closely connected to the land and the ubiquitous water of the murky bayous, eerie swamps and Gulf of Mexico. And they are connected to their Cajun heritage.

“Cajun is almost a code word for the mix of cultures that has taken place in South Louisiana,” said Glenn R. Conrad, a historian and director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. “We’ve learned how to live together.”

To many outsiders, Cajun is synonymous with the spicy food of New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme and the honky-tonk music of its zydeco bars. But here, Cajun is a way of life and a point of sustenance.

As Thursday’s bright sunshine seemed to vanquish the last threat of destruction from this storm, thousands of residents returned to their homes for the first time and confronted the damage. Hundreds of mobile homes were destroyed; thousands of trees were uprooted and houses damaged. State and parish officials estimate that it will be next week at the earliest before thousands of homes and businesses get electricity again.

But the large, extended families and neighbors pitched in to help one another.

Conrad, who lives in hard-hit New Iberia, was clearing debris and trees from his yard with the help of one of his sons.

“After we’re done here, we’ll go over and help my father, who lives two blocks away,” he said. “Then we’ll help my daughter, who lives five blocks away and my other son, who lives four blocks from here.”

Besides damaging houses and businesses, the storm flattened thousands of acres of the region’s biggest cash crop, sugar cane. Along virtually every road and highway in Acadiana, the huge green stalks of cane lay, bent and twisted markers of the storm’s path.

State agriculture officials still had not surveyed the extent of the damage Thursday, but the storm surely was a severe blow to the local economy. But here, too, the sense of a Cajun community is likely to help the region rebound.

“This year was supposed to be a good year for the cane farmers after two years of bad weather,” said Jan Duggar, dean of the business school at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. “Now, it is going to be slower and more expensive to harvest the crop, but they’ll help each other.”

The hearty people who built their new lives in this inhospitable cellar of America were French, who were forced by the British to leave their homeland in what is now Nova Scotia in 1755. Their story is best known to most Americans through Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s tragic epic poem, “Evangeline.” In a bit of poetic irony, Andrew’s path here followed much of U.S. 90, which is also called the Evangeline Thruway.

The French had settled on the Atlantic coast of Canada in 1605. They called that land Acadia. But the treaty that ended the French-Indian war between the British and the French forced the Acadians to leave their home.

The British tried to send the Acadians to their English colonies on the Eastern Seaboard. But after being rebuffed by colonial governors in Virginia and elsewhere largely because of their Catholicism, most of the Acadians sought haven in the French colony of St. Domingue, which was known to the natives as Haiti.

In 1765, a band of 230 of them hired a ship and sailed from Haiti to southern Louisiana. At the time, the area was a Spanish territory under rule of a French caretaker government. The new immigrants were first sent to this part of the region to work on large cattle ranches, but they soon spread out and claimed land of their own.

According to Cajun legend, the exile from Acadia was so difficult that the native lobsters that had followed them shriveled up into crawfish.

By 1785, word of available land and religious tolerance had spread and 4,000 former Acadians were here. Joined by former French soldiers and a large influx of freed African-American slaves, they formed the nucleus of the new Acadia and the stew that is now known as Cajun began to bubble.

The new residents brought to the region a host of beautiful place names--the Atchafalaya Basin, Bayou Teche, Vermillion Bay--along with a unifying religion and language.

“The tie that has bound us for a long time is French and the Catholic religion,” said historian Conrad. “We were a Francophone island in an English sea.”

They also were united by the distinctive cuisine and unique music that developed over the years, spawning an accurate picture of Cajuns as fun-loving, good-eating folks. Tabasco sauce, the red-hot additive to so much Cajun food, was invented on Avery Island on the southern tip of Acadia.

“They all enjoy the good times--dancing and gambling and, of course, the cuisine is a major factor in their lives,” said Conrad.

On Tuesday night, the tiny town of Delcambre just above Vermillion Bay was in the cross hairs of Andrew. Volunteer firemen there passed the night playing a card game called bourre in the firehouse while a gumbo stew boiled on the stove.

When a visitor asked the name of the game, one of the firemen offered in a melodious Cajun voice: “Just sit down. We’ll tell you when you win.”

Through the decades, the Cajun culture spread across the southern part of the state and became most famous in New Orleans. But the heart of things Cajun is found in the tiny towns and fishing villages in this area, the slow-moving bayous lined with cypress, oak and pecan trees dripping Spanish moss and the endless swamps.

All along Andrew’s well-marked path, countless numbers of those oaks and cypress lie on their sides, ripped whole from the ground or scattered across yards and fields, cleaved by the force of the hurricane.

Over on the Vermillion River outside Delcambre and northwest of Franklin, a dozen shrimp fishermen rode out Andrew’s wrath on their boats, refusing to leave their livelihood. When the storm hit, Police Chief Glenn Dore knew where every one of the fishermen was located and kept a close watch on their safety.

“We were all born here, and we love our little town,” Dore said, chomping on a cigar and hoisting his belt around his ample girth. “We love our Cajun culture, too.”

Gerald Ayo and his wife, Rachel, spent that tense night aboard their shrimp boat, the Lady Nola.

“The hurricane wouldn’t have chased us out,” he said Thursday. “We would have stayed right here, no matter how bad it got. A lot of people think we’re crazy, but that’s how we live.”

By Thursday night, Ayo and most of the shrimpers were plying their trade in the waters of Vermillion Bay, once the dead-center of Andrew’s powerful winds. The still-roiled water made for good shrimping.