Louisiana was once one of the richest states in the USA.
All of their oil is pretty much gone except offshore and that is in Federal waters. There is still a large shale gas field called the Haynesville up by Shreveport. Argentina has a developing oil “shale”play of their own. The Vaca Muerta.
True.
In the antebellum period (especially the decades leading up to the Civil War), Louisiana ranked among the wealthiest U.S. states by measures such as per-capita wealth (particularly among free residents) and overall economic output tied to its plantation agriculture and commerce.
nytimes.com
Key reasons included:Highly productive sugar and cotton plantations on fertile Mississippi River soils.
New Orleans as a major port and the nation's largest slave market by the 1840s, making it one of the richest and third-largest U.S. cities.
Concentration of capital in land, enslaved labor (counted as property in wealth statistics), and related banking/commerce. Southern states overall, and Louisiana in particular, often ranked at or near the top in free per-capita wealth; some analyses place Louisiana as high as second in per-capita wealth, with Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina among the national leaders even under certain adjustments for population.
abbevilleinstitute.org
This wealth was highly unequal and heavily dependent on slavery. After the Civil War and emancipation (which eliminated the capital value of enslaved people), Louisiana's relative position declined sharply, and it has ranked near the bottom on many modern economic and quality-of-life metrics.The claim holds for the pre-1860 era.