PIERRE PART, La. — They’d driven from Arkansas and flown from New Zealand. They’d bought “Choot ‘em” hats and T-shirts and a cutting board in the shape of Louisiana. They’d set up lawn chairs and packed coolers and readied Sharpies.
Then, just after noon on a Friday during the last week of August, better known around here as the first week of alligator hunting season, they spotted their prey:
“Troy’s comin’!” a fan whispered, straining to get a look at Troy Landry, the steady star of season after season of “Swamp People,” the History Channel’s reality series set in the heart of the Atchafalaya Basin.
Troy Landry signs the hat of Quinton Forgey, 11, at Duffy’s Sportsmen’s Supply in Pierre Part, La., during a day of “Swamp People” production and alligator hunting.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
Landry, 65, backed his boat into the dock behind the gas station in this small, Cajun city that still has no stoplight but still has his heart.
Sweaty and red-faced, he and his son Chase began roping gators so big they had to be transported by forklift, hanging from their jaws and set in a row before onlookers to be measured from tooth to tail. As a cameraman captured the line-up, Landry furrowed and frowned, a look “Swamp People” turns to during the height of a hunt, when the water is low or the bait is unclaimed.
Then his face broke into a boyish grin.
That grin draws fans worldwide to Pierre Part, La., pop. 2,300, where his family has been hunting and fishing and running the bait shops and working the restaurants for so long there’s a self-published book at the gas station mapping their Louisiana history back to the 18th century. (“The Landry Families of Pierre Part” will cost you $29.99.)
“He’s the Obi-Wan Kenobi,” said Colton Cuculich, 28, who drove 17 hours with his mom from northern Missouri. He left with autographs on his legs that he had an artist transform into tattoos. “He’s number one. He started it all.”
The day after Colton Cuculich nabbed autographs from the “Swamp People” stars in Pierre Part, La., he had them turned into tattoos.
Photo courtesy Colton Cuculich
Each September, during filming, the fans fill the cabins and book the swamp tours.
“It’s unreal what it does for this little community,” said state Sen. Eddie Lambert, whose own cabin rentals and personal houseboat were booked solid for the month. “Troy put it on the map.”
Catch Landry outside Duffy’s Sportsmen’s Supply, the hub of it all, and he will give you an autograph, sure. But he’ll also offer his take on the conditions that season. A tale about the gator that gave him the biggest fight that morning. A beer, once filming’s wrapped.
If he’s met you before, he’ll ask about your “better half.” How Arkansas is treating you.
The long-running History Channel reality show “Swamp People” has filmed in Pierre Part, La., since 2010. This welcome sign next to Duffy’s Sportsmen’s Supply greets visitors, including the show’s ardent fans.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
In my case, he razzed me about the time in his truck a few weeks earlier, when we got a flat tire.
“Don’t listen when she says, ‘Oh, I know the way,’” Landry said, raising his eyebrows, grinning. “She’ll get you a flat tire!
“She will, she will.”
‘An instant hit’
At some point during our day together, before the flat, Landry figured he ought to find me an alligator.
Gators were, after all, how he became famous.
Alligator hunters head for a boat launch on Lake Verret for the first week of filming History Channel’s “Swamp People” on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
We hadn’t planned a hunt, weren’t pulling a boat. But Landry had a gun wedged between the cushion and the console of the front seat of his pickup, just in case, and a specific alligator in mind: “Marshmallow,” named for the treats his grandkids give him.
We’d ended up an hour into the woods because Landry had got to talking about his land.
“I’m going to therapy,” he said of his ventures into the woods. “Nobody can come. I’m going to my happy place.”
It’s 500 acres of land Landry plans to put in a trust “for the grandbabies.” Land filled with old oak trees whose branches brush the ground. With fruit trees, long abandoned but still blooming. With crab traps, piled high and covered with honeysuckle, for the deer.
“Swamp People” made it possible.
An alligator is measured during filming of a new “Swamp People” season.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
Landry was the first character named in the first episode of the first season of “Swamp People” in 2010. The show, which tracks swampers through bayous and cypress groves over an intense, monthlong hunting season, treads similar territory as fellow cable reality hits such as “Duck Dynasty,” “Gold Rush” and “Deadliest Catch.” The kind of shows that, at first, seem to be about a hyper-specific culture in a hyper-specific place but always end up being about people and family and how we relate to one another.
And in the case of “Swamp People,” an ode to a disappearing way of life.
The show was “an instant hit,” said Mary Donahue, a senior vice president at the History Channel. “It was so beautiful and so unusual and the characters were so admirable …
“Mr. Troy was an immediate standout.”
Troy Landry prepares to head out to a morning of alligator hunting on the first day of filming “Swamp People’s” latest season in Pierre Part, La.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
Donahue, one the early executives on the series, spent time with Landry and his family and still counts their crawfish boil among her career highlights. She has a master’s degree in American Studies and sees in the Atchafalaya swamp one of the country’s last frontiers.
“Independence, self-reliance, all these wonderful qualities,” she said, “and that’s what I saw in the characters that were part of ‘Swamp People.’”
Duffy’s Sportsmen’s Supply in Pierre Part, La., sells gator heads and other items that might entice fans of “Swamp People,” who come each year to meet the stars of the reality series.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
The show has been airing for so many seasons that even Donahue was surprised when she looked up just how long. “Season 18?” she said. “Jeepers!” Cast members can’t remember how many seasons they’ve filmed. (Dozens have appeared for a season, or three, then retreated back into anonymity.)
By the time “Swamp People” found him, Landry was in his late 40s.
He’d been working hard since he was 10. Lifting, pulling, loading. “We didn’t have no forklifts.” His father started his bait business with a cooler the size of a pickup. His parents took their honeymoon in a borrowed car.
Landry brought the same daylight-to-darkness ethic to the show.
Early on, at one Cabela’s opening or another, Landry was suddenly encountering lines of people who’d been waiting hours to meet him. He and his sons, who also star on the show, sat and signed and snapped photos until the line got down to zero.
Spectators and fans of “Swamp People” gather to watch alligator hunters arrive at Duffy’s Sportsmen’s Supply during the show’s the first week of filming on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, in Pierre Part, La.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
Meanwhile, the star of another buckshot-littered reality series “went and locked himself in the truck,” Landry said. “We sat there for three hours and took pictures. You sat in an air-conditioned truck.”
That’s why, when folks say that Landry got lucky, he acknowledges the bit of luck that led a team of TV producers to Pierre Part. But he also points out the work involved. “We’re lucky. We’re lucky, man. But we always went out of our way. We always took care.
“That’s why it’s lasted so long — because we took the time.”
‘I can touch it’
Out of the woods and onto the road, it became clear: the back tire was flat. Landry pulled over, made a couple calls. A second truck was on its way.
Then, as we sat chatting, his mom called: His father, who is in poor health, had fallen, again.
Their rambler was close, and Landry drove quickly. By the time we arrived, his father was upright, his mother was smoking a cigarette, and his cousin was sitting at the kitchen table with the two of them.
They hugged, they kissed, they shouted to one another in Cajun French, loud enough so his father could hear.
Cameraman Blair Madigan films Jacob and Troy Landry during “Swamp People” production in Pierre Part, La., on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
At first, “Swamp People” fans probably tuned in for the gator hunts. But they stayed for this: Landry caring for his aging parents. Teaching his grandkids — “my little gang,” as he put it. Jacob’s sons Ridge and Moose are hunters, as evidenced by an episode in which the boys pulled in a few gators on their own, testing out their own catchphrases.
But when Landry goes into the woods with one of his granddaughters, he has a different focus. “I say, ‘You want to bring the gun this time? You want to try to shoot ‘em?’ And she says, ‘Let ’em live, Paw.’”
He kept chuckling, wiping a tear from his eye. “‘Let ‘em live, Paw.’”
Lyndsi Landry records alligators with Austin Alleman at Duffy’s in Pierre Part, La., on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
Cheyenne Wheat, better known to viewers as Landry’s deckhand, “Pickle,” thought he was a tyrant when she first got in his boat. The two hunters were generations apart but “about the same person,” she said. “We are both going to push and shove.”
Quickly, though, Landry opened up with Wheat, whom he calls the daughter he never had. He shared his prostate cancer diagnosis, the loss of a close friend. He hosted her wedding on his land, officiating the ceremony. Then, when Wheat had another baby and had to balance filming with breastfeeding, pumping on the boat, Landry eased his own pace, tapping his watch when it hit 9 a.m.
Tony “Tet Tony” Hebert, Jacob Landry, Troy Landry and cameraman Blair Madigan leave from Lake Verret for a morning of alligator hunting during “Swamp People” filming.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
Landry does not, typically, ease up. (He ranks past deckhands and camera operators on their speed, or lack of it.)
But really, he could have slowed his own pace sooner. Should have eased his own pace sooner.
After the show’s first episode, way back when, Landry happened to chat with a lawyer friend in town. She told him he ought to trademark some of his goofy sayings — “tree shaker” and “mudda freaka” among them.
So he did, subbing the “s” for a “c” to make “Choot ‘em,” which is now emblazoned on stacks of hats at Duffy’s.
What little he knew about money, he’d learned before the show began. His father had been bugging him for years to invest. So after a crawfish season, Landry put $40,000 into stocks. Months later, the Sept. 11 attacks tanked the market.
From then on, he bought property instead of stocks. Houses rather than bonds. (His great-grandmother’s house among them.) And land, above all.
Spectators gather to see “Swamp People” hunters and gators arrive at Duffy’s Sportsmen’s Supply.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
“I can see it,” he said, “I can touch it.”
But he kept crawfish farming, daylight to darkness, missing weekends and weddings. Finally, two years ago, he sold.
“We used to work this much,” he said, stretching wide his hands, which are thick as gator tails, “for this much money,” he said, bringing them close. “Now we work this much,” he said, extending them a bit, “for this much money.”
And he pulled his hands wide.
‘Just regular folk’
It was 6 a.m. and the sky was still pink as Landry and his son Chase set off on Lake Verret, past a single, stately cypress tree.
Trailing them was an old friend, Tony Hebert, aka Tet Tony.
But other than one cameraman, no crew, no lights. No crowd.
They’d be gone for five hours, the crowd forming behind Duffy’s, getting word about whether the hunting had been good (it had) or they’d gotten a big one (they had).
Adalyn Alleman, 2, checks out an alligator brought to Duffy’s Sportsmen’s Supply during a day of “Swamp People” filming in Pierre Part, La.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
Ken Fox and his wife, Lisa, had driven down from Michigan, thinking they’d get an autograph or two, a moment or two. But Fox tried not to expect too much. He’d helped a friend with his security business, so he’d met celebrities before. For the most part, he wishes he hadn’t.
But the Landry crew proved him wrong. As they chatted with Chase earlier in the week, Jacob cleaned around the station with a leaf blower.
“You think they’d have people doing that kind of stuff, but they’re just regular folk, working their business like anybody else.
“They were just as genuine guys as you’ll ever want to meet.”
A key part of each episode is when the tape measure comes out. It’s not just theater, it determines how much the hunters get paid. They used to hunt for gator skins but that market has dried. Now they hunt for meat. But even that doesn’t make them much, these days. The show has made a difficult market slightly more profitable.
On this day, Hebert stuck a silver rod in the biggest alligator’s mouth. 11-foot, 7-inches.
But an invoice took note of — and calculated payment for — all 15 gators they’d brought in.
After the cameraman had set down his equipment and the crew had put away the tape measurer, Landry grabbed a wide bucket and a long knife and headed toward the alley, where several 10-pound bags of chicken legs had been laying in the sun. Each day, after the gators are measured and weighed, Landry goes back on the water, setting the bait for the next morning.
He sliced through the plastic, released the stench and dumped the rotting meat into the bucket.
It was then that two fans approached, phones in selfie mode. He protested, at first, gesturing to the chicken. But then he wiped his hand on his pants, put the knife around her arm and smiled.
“It’s just an honor to meet you,” said Hannah Lawson, 22, in town from South Carolina.
Landry gave fist bump after fist bump, never stopping to move into the shade, never stopping to wash his hands. A smile for each fan, a joke for each friend.
Fans gather around Troy Landry at Duffy’s Sportsmen’s Supply on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026.
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER